Renee Liu - Gold Award

School: Lake Oswego High School
Category: Teens (11-15)
Hours: 314.5

Renee is a junior at Lake Oswego High School and is currently 16. After learning Java(a computer science language) in the summer of sixth grade, Renee aspired to teach some of her knowledge about it back to the community. Therefore, she started teaching classes at Oregon Hope Chinese School, where she has taught for about three full years now! She has taught four different levels of Java that increase in difficulty. Each iteration of a level covers one term, a period of ten classes of one hour each. She has not only led a group of previous Java students to revise the Java curriculum, but has also taught a previous student to become the teacher of a few courses, too. She hopes that every one of her students has learned something valuable that can be taken with them to their future careers.

Renee has also been a teacher assistant(TA) for MLP 8(Chinese grade 8) at Oregon Hope Chinese School for the third year now, where she creates activities to engage the students in learning Chinese. Through the activities, she hopes to encourage the learning of Chinese and the spreading of Chinese culture.

In addition, Renee has worked on helping other students in Speech and Debate. Whether this be through speaking skills, technique, content, or structure, she has enjoyed helping students become stronger, just like how she has become stronger through Speech and Debate. She has worked with both high school students and middle school students.

Other activities that Renee has participated in is Green Team(a group focused on implementing sustainable practices at schools and in the community), a Girl Scouts coding project(a project that focuses on creating a website that can make scheduling classes a lot easier at the high school as part of a Girl Scouts Gold Award project), the Translation Advisory Council (a council for the Secretary of State that reviews translations of the voter’s pamphlet for cultural appropriateness), tutoring English for Chinese Americans, and coordinating and participating in outreach for Lake Monsters Robotics.

She sincerely thanks everyone who has helped her become who she is today.

Oregon Chinese Coalition is proud to join the President of the United States in recognizing the volunteers who consistently take the time to make a difference in the lives of others. Therefore, it is a great honor to present the President’s Volunteer Service Award (PVSA) to Renee Liu.