Learn here. Teach here. Lead across borders. One student, walking the whole pathway.
Furqaan joined the YTC club at ETHS the way most students do: without a plan. What the club handed him wasn't a curriculum — it was a bench, a machine that didn't work yet, and an older student willing to show him why.
Then it handed him the other half of the deal. In this club, learning something means you owe it forward: the day comes when you're the one standing at the bench, and the confused freshman is looking at you. Furqaan taught. Then he taught the teachers. Then he found himself helping lead a club whose work stretches from Evanston senior residences to classrooms in Africa — part of a chain of ETHS students who have mentored peers in Ethiopia, Namibia, and Mozambique since 2009.
It's like the club has generations. Leaders change, but the idea stays. The president is the president because people trust them to keep things going.— Furqaan, 17 · YTC student, Evanston
That sentence is the club in miniature. Nobody appointed Furqaan a leader. The room did — because leadership here isn't a title handed down by adults, it's trust accumulated one taught lesson at a time. That's what "student-run since 2009" actually means: seventeen years of students like Furqaan receiving the club from the generation ahead and handing it, improved, to the one behind.
CONFIRM Closing paragraph — where the pathway points next for him (current status, plans), plus additional direct quotes from Student Voices and the video interview if one exists.