Dear <<First Name>> ,

We hope you've had a wonderful Christmas weekend, and Happy New Year! As always, we’re very grateful for your support and contribution to our QZMS family for another fruitful year. We hope you stay safe and warm, and wish you good health and lots of happiness this coming new year!

In this newsletter, we’re excited to share with you about:

• QZMS 2021 Annual Report Stats
• Warm Message from Board Chair Nick
• Welcome New Scholars & Fundraising
• Mentor Highlight: Dalton Victor
• 1st QZMS Book Club
• Speaker Session by QZMS Alumna
• QZMS in the Wild

"Meeting more great people has been most valuable to me. And I always encourage my students through my experience.” – HE Xiaobing

"During the critical period, I broadened my horizons and realized more possibilities.” –WANG Nana

"I was told that I can still fulfill my dream of studying abroad even though I am not from a rich family. I was encouraged to apply for an exchange year in Germany, which was a life-changing experience for me. I finally decided to come back to Germany to continue my graduate study, and will pursue a PhD afterwards.” – ZHANG Yani

"Vision and courage. Broaden your horizons and dare to set greater goals. Have the courage to change myself.” – LI Ping
 

It's been another great year for QZMS!  Although we had to forego our in-person personal development workshop for the 2nd straight year, we were able to schedule more speakers, continue our public speaking class, and run our first-ever book club for the scholars.  For this, I have to thank our awesome board members for all of their hard work, dedication, and fun!  It's been a great pleasure to work with you all, even though we've had to do it from afar for over two years now!

Equally importantly, we also recruited our 11th class of scholars, which ended up being such a large class because of the many qualified and capable scholars.  This wouldn't have been possible without all of the generous donations over the past 10+ years that have enabled us to be a full year ahead of our fundraising needs, so that we were able to sponsor all of the qualified scholars.  Thank you so much to our donors for your continued support!

It's also important to note that, as has always been the case, our whole organization is completely volunteer-based; all donations go exclusively to paying for scholarships and in-person event programming.  A HUGE part of the value of QZMS comes from the mentorship provided by our professional and alumnae/senior scholar mentors.  Thank you to our community of volunteers, without whom, our program wouldn't be anywhere near as effective at changing our scholars' lives.

Lastly, thank you to our scholars.  Your continued passion, drive, and success inevitably warms my heart and provides me a great deal of hope in a world that seems to try really hard to snuff it out.

Here's to a hopeful 2022 of continued progress, bridging communities, and breaking glass ceilings for our impressive scholars!

• Mentors: Chao Zhang, Vivian Law, Peng Zhang, Daphne Choong, Omair Azam, Pablo Che Leon, Janice Kwan
• Scholars/Alumnae: BAI Wenlu, ZHANG Yani, FENG Yanxia, BAI Linling, LI Ping, SHU Jia, JIANG Yan, WANG Qian

I have had the privilege of being involved with QZMS since 2015 as a Board Member, Mentor and Sponsor.  Getting to know the Mentees has always been a highlight of this wonderful program and I have been lucky that my work travel has allowed me to meet many in person.  When I was working for Intel I would occasionally stop by Beijing on my way to Malaysia.  My current job at Google has brought me to factories in Chongqing and Shenzhen for weeks at a time.

Yihui Chen asked me to write about running multiple programs simultaneously as I currently lead 5+ Programs as a Senior Technical Program Manager at Google which will yield revenue for the company of several  billion dollars over the next few years.  Each separate team has between 10 and 50 active core members who are supported by hundreds of other cross-functional team mates.  The best way for me to keep contributing at a high level is to gain the trust of my teams, such that I can delegate a lot of tasks to others on my program teams or to other cross-functional teams.  I prioritize tasks for the team by considering dependencies such as schedule, budget, other programs needs and teammates’ bandwidth. We then work together to make sure that we have the right strategy for success while maintaining a strong sense of team and work-life balance for our teammates.

Our first book club in QZMS history held this fall was a glorious success. The book we discussed is Dale Carnegie's book "How To Make Friends And Influence People''. It was a two-session bookclub. We asked our scholars to experiment at least one tip from the book after our first session in October, and we talked about their results & reflections during our second session in early December. 
 

We chatted about topics that included fundamental techniques to create meaningful relationships with people, whether personal or at work; ways to make people trust and believe in you; how to positively influence people; and how to be a great leader without being offensive or arousing resentment. 

6 Speaker Session by our Alumna WANG Qian

This December, we had our final speaker event of 2021, and QZMS's 31st in history, and the first one by an alumna WANG Qian 王倩. She presented on the "Xia Dynasty -- Throne passes from sages to relatives".

We're happy to share how this presentation was created: Earlier this year, WANG Qian 王倩 prepared this presentation as part of her monthly call with her mentor Janice, who was so impressed and delighted that she suggested we bring it to the whole QZMS community.

We always encourage our QZMS family members (mentors, scholars and alumnae) to meet in person all over the world whenever they live close or happen to be in the same city:)

During the global pandemic, we understand it’s harder to make this happen. Here, we're excited that Yin and Pedro managed to meet in NYC when Yin was on a business trip early this Fall.