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Miami Palmetto High School rising senior Anna Liu is the Chief Financial Officer for the Pinecrest Music City Project. She also works as a teacher, instructing elementary school children how to play the violin.
This month will mark her two year anniversary with the Pinecrest Music City Project, a student run organization. The organization works with elementary and middle school students across Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
“We usually go the schools to mentor the orchestra and band students,” she says. “We also expanded our classes to include Music Coding in partnership with Georgia Tech, Vocal Performance, and Music Theory and Composition, among others.”
With the advent of COVID-19, classes switched from in-person to online.
Liu began playing the violin at age five. She played in the Greater Miami Youth Orchestra in middle school but stopped in order to concentrate on academics.
Liu is president of XplainED, a 501(c)3 non-profit that connects elementary and middle school students with tutors. The tutors are paid for their time, and XplainED takes a 25 percent cut that they then donate to teachers to help them purchase supplies for the classroom. XplainED was founded in the last year or two.
In addition to the private tutoring, Liu says XplainED offers seminars, including ones on coding.
For the last couple of years, Liu has been volunteering with Achieve Miami.
“I work as a Big Buddy,” she says. “We are high school mentors that go to elementary schools to read and write with second through fifth graders.”
She is a member of the Achieve Miami Junior Advisory Board.
“We work on leadership skills and give input on a lot of the Achieve Miami culture,” she says. “It was great to meet a lot of kids from around Miami.”
Until COVID drove Achieve Miami to switch to Zoom sessions, Liu had traveled to Caribbean Elementary to work with the children. She expects the program to return to in-person sessions with the start of the new school year.
At Palmetto, she’s the incoming co-president of the National Forensic League, the Debate Club.
COVID restrictions kept the Debate Club members from attending in-person competitions.
One of the goals for the coming year is to get back to competitions and increasing membership.
“We plan in house competitions for a better way for our competitors to practice,” she says.
“The plan is to bring in other schools but sometimes that can be a little difficult.”
Liu usually competes in Public Forum debates with a partner. She has to be prepared to debate both sides of an issue. Competitors don’t know which side they will be taking until the competition.
She’s the treasurer of Women in Tech, another new club, which is separate branch of Mu Alpha Theta, the math honor society.
“We teach members how to code in Python and also bring in guest speakers from the computer science field,” she says. “It’s extremely important for everyone to know a coding language.”
She’s a member of the Social Science Honor Society and participated in the History Bowl.
She’s also in the National Honor Society, and she a member of the Student Council.
This summer she’s been exploring both college majors and potential colleges. She’s undecided on a major but does have a few institutions that she’s likely to apply to. They include Duke University, The University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and the University of Florida.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
