By Casey Rah, sophomore at Billings Central Catholic High School
In 2019, former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy Schmidt established RISE to, “find brilliant people…and support them for life,” according to a document shared by the organization. They issued a challenge to all students ages 15-17 in the world to find a specific problem in the world and try to address it. Over 10,000 of the worlds brightest students applied to the program, with only 100 winners. One of these winners was Hank Jagodzinski from Billings Central Catholic High School.
Jagodzinski’s application process started in the winter of 2020, near the beginning of his freshman year of high school. In the first phase of the RISE challenge, Jagodzinski was asked to introduce himself through a series of short videos in which he answered several prompts presented. Everyone who completed this phase moved on to the next one.
In the second phase of the project, RISE participants looked at the world and picked a specific problem to address, “That’s where I started my work with expanding student journalism access in Montana and conducting some research on the state of student journalism,” said Jagodzinski. By the end of the spring of 2021, all of the RISE participants submitted their projects.
Later that year, 500 students were selected from among the original tens of thousands of applicants. The 500 selected students participated in a Zoom call that lasted for about six hours. During the call, they were broken up into groups of 5-10 people and presented with challenges faced in the world today. They were then asked to collaborate to find potential solutions to these problems.
After extensive review of the footage from the Zoom call, the videos submitted about the projects, verification submitted for the projects, and the original introduction videos, 100 winners were chosen from the 500 announced. The review process began in July and lasted until October. The winners of the RISE challenge get extensive support for the rest of their lives. They are offered mentorship and career services, programming, higher education scholarships, and access to technology. They also are given the opportunity to apply for additional funding each year for any innovative ideas they have or for education support in the future. Additionally, all of the RISE winners will attend a three-week residential summit to
give them a chance to connect with each other and exchange ideas.
According to Jagodzinski, RISE was founded to, “offer access to benefits that last a lifetime…as global winners work towards solving humanity’s most pressing problems.” Jagodzinski was one of five winners featured on Good Morning America.
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