How can we stop global warming? Why is it so difficult to get rid of widespread poverty? MacDuffie Thinks Big is a new club that takes real world problems like these and tries to apply practice solutions to them. It is based off of a project called China Thinks Big (CTB), a social entrepreneurship competition that typically concludes with a worldwide conference at Harvard University.

Sophomore Carrie Lu was inspired by CTB and decided she wanted to replicate the club here at MacDuffie. The club meets three days a week to discuss environmental and social issues. The ultimate goal is to attend the China Thinks Big conference at Harvard University later this spring, and the club has been fundraising through selling candy, in order to help pay for the cost of the conference. “I am very excited for the huge potential our club has,” said Lu. “I am excited to try to help our community and our world.”

The team is still deciding exactly which important issue to tackle, but they have narrowed down their area of study to psychology or education, and Lu is confident that the group will be successful. Once this is done, they will have to create a project that highlights their proposed solution to the problem. They will then have to support their solution with sources that suggest their proposition will work. In the winter, the group will be FaceTiming professors to be critiqued on their work up to that point, so that they can make adjustments to their project before it is put under review to be entered into the conference.