No - clearly, those of us in the photo above are not Hong Kong’s next young UWC ambassadors!

The photo shows Hong Kong’s UWC “ambassador selectors” - those eight of the nine members of the UWC Hong Kong Selection Committee who were able to be present on Thursday afternoon for an extremely important meeting at Yew Chung International School in Kowloon Tong.

All volunteers appointed by the Home Affairs Bureau (HAB) of the Hong Kong Government, the committee members are smiling because they have just completed an enormous and very challenging task that began last December.  That task was to finalise the list of 71 names to be submitted to the UWC Hong Kong Committee in the last week of April for consideration as students to enter United World Colleges in September this year.

Three of the members this year were UWC graduates themselves, and the other members of the Committee were selected by the HAB to represent a broad cross-section of interests and expertise that reflects Hong Kong’s society.

Starting with a list of several hundred names of applicants, the Committee managed to oversee the aptitude testing in January, Challenge Day in February and over a hundred panel interviews during March.

If the 71 selected names are endorsed by the UWC Hong Committee in late April, offers will be made to students applying for overseas UWCs immediately, while students selected for Li Po Chun UWC in Hong Kong will have to wait until mid-June for their good news.

This meeting was not the end of the interviewing process, however.  Although the interviews of Hong Kong applicants have now been completed, several interviews remain to be done of IQ (International Quota) students.  These will be conducted at various times over the coming two months.

After seven years serving as Secretary of the UWC Hong Kong Selection Committee, this was my last meeting before moving to the US at the end of July.  It was thus with special gratitude but a deep sense of humility that I accepted an invitation from the Chair of the Committee, Dr Betty Chan, to attend a small dinner in my honour following Thursday’s meeting.  It was wonderful to be able to relax and discuss broad educational matters, a stark contrast to the very focussed and intense process of interviewing student applicants.

I will certainly miss this experience that I have enjoyed for the past seven years, contributing to the selection of hundreds of young men and women to attend United World Colleges around the globe, opening the doors for them to serve as ambassadors for Hong Kong while at the same time gaining a world-class education to prepare them for a full life of living the UWC values.