After interviewing Junior Whitney Peng, the new Vice President of The Macduffie School for next year, we learned a lot about her.

Peng decided last summer that she was ready to run for the position. Peng was influenced by multiple people in the National Leadership Conference last year. She is looking to promote a sense of responsibility and sense of society. She says, “I feel like a lot of people in our school are not involved with the society. They spend their comfortable days in school, but they do not realize how difficult life is for most of the people outside school.”

She wants people to do more community service and thus get a sense of what society is like outside the bubble of our school. As part of the election process, she gave multiple talks about why she should be Vice President. She prepared herself by writing down what she wanted to say and practicing it over and over in front of a mirror, which helped her build more confidence. “Also watching some pep talks really helped me the night before,” she said.

Peng  said that talking in front of the school was certainly stressful, but she is doing what she wants and likes. Peng felt that she was pretty confident that she was going to win but still had some nerves that she might not. With the other candidates being American and her being international she felt she could be at a disadvantage, but she did believe in herself. She temporarily kept her victory secret from her family, so that the news could be a birthday present to her father. Peng never saw herself becoming VP of our school one day, though she felt that she had changed so much this year at school and “got kinda radical at last.”