“I have a lot of friends who are also interested in business, but there just weren’t opportunities where I’m from. So I thought, I might as well give these same opportunities to other people.”
-Emily Gao
Emily Gao has always been interested in business. As a high school sophomore, she just didn’t have many places to explore it.
“At my school, we’re a little underfunded, so we didn’t have any business opportunities,” she says.
Then a post in her school’s Google Classroom caught her eye: a free five-week venture program from Girls With Impact.
Emily signed herself up for GWI’s Innovation Academy. At 15, she was one of the youngest participants in her group, and by the end she had built her first business idea, Vision Assets, a charm bracelet where you add your dreams and aspirations. She learned the basics of building and testing an idea, including what an MVP is.
She assumed her GWI journey was over. Really, it was only beginning.
Launching Her Own SheLeads Club
GWI was bringing SheLeads, its leadership club program, to high schools, and reached out to Emily, who had already been through a GWI program. She knew what she wanted to do: start a leadership club at her own school.
“I have a lot of friends who are also interested in business, but there just weren’t opportunities where I’m from,” she says. “So I thought, I might as well give these same opportunities to other people.”
In her junior year, Emily launched a SheLeads club. It started with three close friends. When she looked over the curriculum GWI provides, she thought that the résumé-building lessons would help freshmen and sophomores the most, so she made them her target audience.
To spread the word, she built an Instagram account, posted videos on the morning announcements, and worked every club fair. Her friends were nervous about being on camera.
“I told them, guys, we’ve got to lock in,” she says. “I had no shame. I was just going to let everyone see what we were doing.”
Soon other clubs started making videos too.
Her pitch was simple: the club meets every other week, you learn real career skills, and there are snacks. Parents took notice and encouraged their kids to join. By graduation, the club had grown from three students to about 30 committed members.
“I was very nervous,” Emily says. “Initially I thought, ‘This is not going to work out.’ But as more people got involved, it became a thing where everyone’s going to do it and it’s going to stay forever.”
Before she left, Emily handed the club to a younger member and helped her connect with an internship at GWI. Today the club’s Instagram has close to 500 followers, and its new leader checks in with Emily every month.
“It’s honestly one of the best things I’ve done in high school,” she says.
From Program Participant to Intern
Emily also interned with GWI, where her responsibilities grew along with her confidence. Where she grew up, there weren’t many internship opportunities, and she wasn’t sure how to find one.
“I was able to help hands-on with everything from sending emails to creating budgets and outlines, slideshows, curriculum, and presentations,” she says. “I learned not just soft skills but hard skills as well.”
That leadership experience became the center of her college story. GWI was one of the first activities on her Common App, it appeared in her supplemental essays, and it anchored her interview.
“I made sure to emphasize GWI because it played a really big part in my last two years of high school,” she says. She talked about how it led her to community service and to the major she chose. She credits her GWI experience as a major factor in getting into Yale University.
Leveraging Her GWI Experience in the Ivy League
Today, Emily is a first-year student at Yale studying global affairs with a certificate in data science. She has joined consulting and investment clubs, where she uses the skills she built at GWI, from creating presentations to talking with people in professional settings. After a few years in corporate, she hopes to start a nonprofit focused on education or women’s empowerment.
For Emily, the biggest lesson is that you don’t have to stay stuck in the circumstances you’re in.
“GWI isn’t just an organization that gives you the skills to excel in a professional environment,” she says. “It’s also a place where you can inspire that little girl like me, to give her the mindset that you don’t have to be stuck in the circumstances where you are currently.”
Her advice for the next young woman considering GWI, or thinking about starting a leadership club at her school, is to go for it:
“There are so many opportunities out there, and you can step out of your comfort zone and achieve them if you just go for it. Take the initiative and don’t be scared. There are so many resources you might not know you have, and GWI can show you where they are.”
Want to start a leadership club at your school? SheLeads is GWI’s free leadership club for high school girls, with more than 50 clubs and counting. Click here to learn more about SheLeads, or explore all of GWI’s programs.