Jovana's September Newsletter '22
An environmental symposium, athletics season, and The Knowledge Society!
Welcome to my (first) September newsletter! I’m Jovana, a 15 year old from Serbia, who is passionate about anything and everything involving saving our planet.
This is me!
I’m currently participating in The Knowledge Society (2022-2023) program! In my following newsletters you can expect me to write about climate action, emerging technologies, mindset, sustainability events, sports, and even more as the year moves on.
This newsletter will be littered with my main takeaways from this amazing summer and start of fall.
The Villars Institute:
Around the start of June, I attended the first ever The Villars Institute symposium based in the Swiss Alps. The symposium was designed to connect young people and experienced professionals in order to educate and fight the climate crisis. It was a fantastic opportunity to connect with like minded students who had a desire to help the planet. From professionals coming from around the world we learned the importance of the food systems, maintaining biodiversity, the urgency of climate action, systems thinking and much more. If you’re curious to learn more about the symposium I will be posting an article in a couple of weeks on my medium!
Athletics 2022 season
August and September of this year were the best I had performed so far! As for everything there were many ups and down in the journey, and I’ll begin with the negatives…
The negatives :
✘ Even though athletics is my passion the competitions would regularly cause me a lot of stress.
✘ I would always feel like my family, coach and team were expecting me to always do amazing. Of course, that was impossible for a human, I had good and bad days. My ‘bad’ competition days would cause me so much anxiety and even breakdowns on the track while trying to reach the qualification limits.
The positives :
✔ I had qualified for my cantonal finals (Zurich) and Switzerland finals in high jump, triple jump, and long jump. Although nerve racking the competitions were a turning point for me.
✔ On August 25th, during the Swiss finals, I placed top twelve in triple jump and received fourth place in high jump, even when entering the competition placed 14th. I beat my personal best in high jump after jumping 160 cm.
✔ In the Zurich finals, I placed first for triple jump and second for high jump. I think I can confidently say that positives outnumber the negatives, and yes, it was all worth it.
Start of a journey: The Knowledge Society
It’s been five weeks and four sessions since the start of The Knowledge Society (TKS for short). TKS is a 10 month program that develops unconventional mindsets and unconventional success (thinking big and impacting billions!). It’s only been a little over a month and I have gotten to know so many people from around the world through meetings we call “brain dates”. I’m also getting closer and closer to finding my “North star” (my passion) through the exploration of different emerging technologies.
Next steps…
In the next week I am aiming to commit to an idea for my main project throughout TKS. Currently, I’m leaning towards brain-computer interfaces and trying to incorporate sustainability in it!
You can expect monthly newsletters to drop throughout this year! Until then, you can find me on:
Thank you for reading my newsletter and I hope to see you in a month!