SYLVIA’S STORY
SYLVIA
Finding Her Voice
For Sylvia Jiang, stepping into Project: VISION wasn’t about seeking opportunity, it was about trust, courage, and finding a place of belonging. During her sophomore year at Lane Tech, she was navigating a world of new faces and high expectations. She followed a friend to Project: VISION, unknowingly taking the first step on a journey that would challenge her, support her, and ultimately shape a future she is now building for her career.
PV kept showing up for her through hardships, a car accident that left her panicked, and the mounting pressure of pursuing college. As a first-generation Chinese American student, she felt responsible for building a future not just for herself, but also for her family.
Today, Sylvia is a first year student at DePaul University, double majoring in Finance and Accounting, networking her way toward a solid career, and still, a PV student of PV’s Watch Out World! Program.
From Healy to Lane:
Sylvia grew up in Chicago’s Chinatown community, the only child of parents who immigrated from China. Her mother worked full-time; her father took on part-time work, often acting as her personal ‘Uber driver,’ she shares with a laugh. In their household, education was never optional. It was an expectation.
After testing into a gifted program in kindergarten, she thrived academically during her elementary years. But by middle school, she was beginning to question what success meant on her own terms, a period of self-discovery she describes candidly as “rebelling.” Her grades shifted from the top of her class to somewhere closer to average, but she was learning something more important: who she was beyond academics.
Lane Tech became her next chapter. Looking back, she believes it was exactly the right fit.
“Lane was a really big school compared to my middle school. I got to learn how to get through a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have learned at a smaller school, how to manage conflicts, stay on top of my grades, all of it.”
It was at Lane that she met Melody. And Melody, it turned out, went to PV.
Showing Up Before She Was on the List
Sylvia’s entry into Project:VISION was unofficial at first. She followed Melody, sat in, and quietly absorbed what was happening around her. “I would come, but I wasn’t on the program list,” she says. “I just followed Melody, and they’d be like, oh yeah, you can bring a friend.”
By the second semester of her sophomore year, she was able to enroll into PV’s programs.
Her path through PV’s programs included the Chicago Youth Service Corps during the summers and Watch Out World! (WOW) during the school year, depending on what she needed and what was available. When she needed an internship, WOW connected her with Munich Reinsurance. There, she found more than work experience. She found a mentor who saw potential in her and took the time to invest in her professional development.
“He would always give me advice…what I need to do. He would teach me how to write an email, all these different tips and tricks in the corporate world that I still use today.”
The internship, she says, was a turning point. She had entered WOW without a clear sense of what she wanted to do. She left with direction and a growing conviction that accounting and finance, with DePaul’s deep investment in the field, was where she wanted to focus.
When It Got Hard
If PV’s programs gave Sylvia college and career scaffolding, our staff gave her something harder to quantify: a safe space when things got hard and people who showed her the way forward.
For example, when Sylvia was involved in a car accident, she found herself fielding calls from lawyers she didn’t know whether to trust. Shaken and uncertain, she turned to leaders at PV who helped her navigate this situation. They helped her parse the calls, verify who was legitimate, and protect herself in a moment when she felt vulnerable.
It wasn’t a program component or a planned intervention. It was proof that PV’s support extended beyond structured activities into the real moments when young people need guidance most.
Learning to Lead Without Meaning To
By her senior year she joined the CYSC again. The girl who had once sat quietly on the edges of group conversations, careful about what she said was now the one talking first.
Her CYSC cohort that year was younger, shyer, and quieter. When program staff would ask the group to explain their project focus, Sylvia would speak up before the silence stretched too long. She didn’t think of it as leadership. She thought of it as filling a gap.
But her peers noticed. They told her afterward that without her willingness to go first, they wouldn’t have known how to begin. She had become, without quite intending to, someone younger students watched for cues on how to show up.
Building Toward the Big Four and What Comes After
Sylvia is still in the middle of her story. She’s attending networking events hosted by major well known companies. She’s pursuing a BNA certificate as a hedge against an uncertain job market reshaped by AI. She’s still communicating with program staff when she needs guidance, and recently accepted an additional spot in WOW to build out her career experiences before graduation.
She’s also scared of what the future holds: “I’m just scared I’m not going to have a job. With AI coming out so fast, I think, at some point, it’s kind of easy to replace people. So I’m going out to different fields, just trying to make sure I have something lined up.”
What keeps her moving, she says, is something she found piece by piece across years of PV programs, staff relationships, and hard won moments of conflict and resolution: the knowledge that she can figure things out, and that she doesn’t have to figure them out alone.
Still Here
Sylvia Jiang is still enrolled in WOW, leaning on the relationships she’s built in a space that lets her be uncertain, curious, and fully herself.
“PV really changed my life,” she says. “I’m still growing, but I know how to grow now. I know how to ask for help. And I know there are people who will show up.”
Sylvia is exactly where she needs to be: growing, learning, and being present in the community that found her.