Standing behind the podium at school meeting, face to face with the entire Upper School student body, Jimmy Lin (12) looks like a caricature of himself: hair spikier, gestures wider. As he lowers the microphone, choruses of “Jimmy Lin!” and “Jimmy we love you!” echo through the bleachers.

“The people you wouldn’t think are part of the fandom are the most dedicated members,” senior Makenzie Tomihiro said with a laugh. “It’s more of a religion, I would say. I don’t want to call it a religion, because that would imply that Jimmy is a god, but he is a god.”

As long as the Class of 2018 can remember, he’s been “Mr. President”—though the nickname is more endearing than reverent. He transferred to Harker in 7th grade, got elected in 8th grade and has remained in student council since.

As ASB President, Jimmy stands at the crossroads of the administration and the student body. Whether responding to faculty suggestions or addressing student complaints over Facebook Messenger, Jimmy begins his responses with the same phrase: “I understand.”

“A lot of times, I [disagree] with people, [but] if I want to work with them, often times the best way to do that is to demonstrate that I have some common ground with them,” he said.

Jimmy credits the TV show Lost for teaching him the value of empathy. While he initially saw the characters as simply “good guys” or “bad guys,” the sudden flashbacks in the show revealed information that challenged his first impressions.

“Sure, it’s just a TV show, but I think it applies to real life,” he said. “Whenever I meet people that I have certain expectations about, I always try to think that this person has a unique background leading up to who they are now. No matter how close I get to this person, there’s always some part of the background that I don’t fully understand.”

Through his experience on student council, he developed an automatic, almost instinctive sense of tact.

“[Jimmy is] extremely honest, but oftentimes, it’s under a layer of very nice-sounding rhetoric,” senior class treasurer Justin Xie said. “So if he wants to say, ‘Your idea is bad,’ it might come out as, ‘You know, I think that’s a really good idea, but I think there’s a better option for X, Y, and Z reasons.’”

Jimmy’s self-described “political correctness” became a habit over the years.

“A lot of my friends will be like, ‘Hey, we’re close friends at this point, why can’t you open up?” he said. “Even my research mentor [said to me], ‘Wow, you’re just like a politician.’ Normally, these aren’t meant to be insults, but they sting a little because they make me feel distant from a lot of people.”

Initially, being on student council gave Jimmy more than a sense of diplomacy—it also boosted his ego.

“Early on, [my friends] would always comment on how humble, how selfless I was towards them,” he said. “I think that as I became a more prominent figure through student council, I became a more arrogant person.”

Determined to counter this, he resolved to constantly try new activities, to relish being the least experienced person in the room. He tried salsa dancing over the summer; he played volleyball starting in freshman year.

Jimmy’s past volleyball teammate Andrew Gu (‘17) appreciated that someone so academically minded would devote hours to an activity with no clear resumé boost. Despite his lack of experience and 5’7’’ stature, Jimmy surprised his taller teammates by managing to block them during practice.

“Jimmy can only get his hands barely over the net, but he was somehow able to block some of the big hitters on our team,” Gu said. “We had a running joke about it. I guess he might not be the most athletic person, or the tallest person, but he still blocked with full intention, and he always pressed over, and that pays off, evidently, because he was able to block us and it was really funny.”

Jimmy balances his time in the public eye with a healthy dose of humility. In activities ranging from dance to volleyball, he embraces the role of the beginner.

“I felt like there were parts of my personality that I left behind in this pursuit of being a public figure,” he said. “One of the ways I tried to reconcile this was to intentionally do things that I was bad at, to force myself—at least during volleyball season—to spend three hours every day being that humble person, whether I liked it or not.”