Leading With Heart: Vivian’s First Year at UCL

2026-06-18

Vivian Guo was part of Hiba Academy Shanghai's very first cohort and its first graduating class. A year ago, she took up an offer from University College London (UCL) to read Youth, Society and Sustainable Development. Asked to describe herself in three words, she chooses action-oriented, empathetic and visionary. Over the course of our conversation, a year's worth of growth comes through clearly: she is more certain about where she is heading, and clearer about why she set out in the first place.

Doing

Instead of Talking

'Efficient' is usually the first word people reach for with Vivian: quick-thinking, decisive, relentlessly practical. She puts it plainly: "I can take an idea and push it into action in a short time."

That instinct showed up early. At school, she served as the inaugural lead for ‘From the Mountain: Staging the Performance’, a Hiba charitable initiative. From the early planning stages through a critical period when the project needed to adapt to practical constraints, she maintained an ongoing dialogue with her teachers and classmates. The teachers took her and her peers’ discussions seriously, working with outside partners to help develop and succeed in the project.

She still remembers how that felt: to be taken seriously, to have her ideas tested rather than dismissed as youthful enthusiasm. It made her readier to take the initiative the next time, and the time after that.

At UCL, she has done exactly that. She stood for election to the Student Union and became the only undergraduate representative among roughly 6,000 students at the Institute of Education, weighing in on university policy. She was later chosen for UCL's Impartial Chair Programme, where she was the youngest participant and the only Chinese student. To her, these roles aren't about titles. They are a way to learn how to lead, how to move a group forward, and how to listen to people with very different levels of influence.

Experiences

That Teach Empathy

Vivian's drive is matched by a strong sense of empathy. She credits Hiba with exposing her to a wide range of people—teachers, parents and professionals across industries—which pushed her to ask bigger questions about who she wanted to become.

Time spent beyond school mattered just as much. She saw the gaps in youth education outside major cities, watched how hard it is for intangible cultural heritage to be understood before it can be valued, and noticed local dialects fading among younger generations. She didn't want to stop at observation. She wanted to translate what she saw into something others could understand and then act on it.

If we can strengthen youth education, could cultural inheritance take a different path?

At UCL, she has continued to seek out experiences that explore such questions. On a university programme in Northern Ireland, she visited former conflict areas and interviewed people who had lived through the violence. Their stories left no room for abstraction: conflict stays in bodies, families and memories, often for decades. It confirmed a choice she had already begun to make—not to watch from the sidelines, but to help people understand one another and affect change.

A Clear Direction:

Education and Culture

Vivian traces her decision to choose UCL back to Grade 7, when she was drawn to its motto, 'Disruptive thinking since 1826.' Critical thinking, she felt, was exactly what she had been looking for.

She had initially planned to study law. But co-founding a Model United Nations club and serving as its pupil head coach reshaped how she thought about education—not as the delivery of knowledge, but as the passing on of a spark.

When UCL launched its new Youth, Society and Sustainable Development degree just before she applied, it fit her interests in culture, education and social issues. She chose it over the safer option of law, treating the uncertainty of joining the first cohort as a chance to shape her own path.

Looking ahead, she hopes to work as what she calls a genuine "education-and-culture practitioner," behind the scenes, helping to renew both fields. This summer, she will travel to an school in Bali to tutor local children and explore sustainability with them through art. Further down the line, she hopes to move from the student version of Model United Nations to the real United Nations, pursuing her ambitions on a far bigger stage.

In her first year at UCL, Vivian has done what she has always done: turned ideas into action, empathy into commitment, and a broad vision into steps she can actually take. She is still going, guided by a line that keeps her motivated: "Keep writing, and it will be brilliant."