Matthew Lu of Edmonton, Alberta, graduated from Old Scona Academic High School, where he was captain of his high school’s Reach for the Top (an academic quiz competition) team, and was a member of the badminton and track teams. He received the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award and First Class Honors.
During his gap year, Matthew’s first placement was with an organization in Shenzhen, China called SZLNKX. SZLNKX serves the elderly by helping them get into events and recruiting retired professionals to volunteer their skills with impoverished rural villages. Matthew mainly worked in the secretarial office helping organize and supervise events. Matthew then volunteered with Jiangmen Foreign Language School in Xinhui, China where he was a teaching assistant to a foreign language teacher. He was tasked with assisting the head teachers through translations. Matthew’s final placement was in Cape Town, South Africa where he worked with the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital as an assistant to the surgeons and secretaries in the Department of Pediatric Surgery. He created spreadsheets to track bed capacity and trends, but he especially enjoyed being able to accompany surgeons into the operating rooms and watching surgeries.
Matthew is a Carolina Scholar and plans to study biology at UNC.
Read Matthew’s blog posts here: