“Hi, I’m Eleanor, and I’m from TALON yearbook.” Accompanied by a sheepish smile, Eleanor Xiao’s (12) classic yearbook announcement opening has become a running joke in the senior class. Her bubbly greeting speaks to her outgoing personality, a testament to her willingness to strike up a conversation with anyone coming her way.

“When I was just a shy, little kid in sixth grade, she came up to me and was like, ‘Jerry, let’s be friends. My name is Eleanor,’” her friend Jerry Chen (12) said.

Outside of school meetings, one can find Eleanor sitting at a table at Philz Coffee, Main Street. She has a signature order—large iced Philtered Soul, light cream, light sweet, as well as a signature look—cropped Lululemon leggings, Rainbow flip flops and a white Hydro Flask. She crouches over her laptop, peering at a yearbook spread in InDesign.

Eleanor joined yearbook her freshman year just to fill up class space, but now, as a senior and TALON Co-Editor-In-Chief, she has gained a deeper understanding of the service that yearbook provides to the community.

“I’ve never really realized the value of yearbook until I joined staff,” she said. “Sometimes, I’ll just sit and think about how the work we’re doing will be looked at 10, 20 years in the future, and it always amazes me that our work will always be captured within this book. It’s something invaluable to everybody who was on campus that year, and I think yearbook goes back to making an impact on people. Even though it sometimes may not feel like it come January-time where it’s really stressful, it is really important to everyone, and I feel like a responsibility to do justice to our campus that year. It’s a good kind of responsibility.”

In all her activities, Eleanor acts on her altruistic desire to help others.

“I believe a lot in empathy, and I believe that empathy and sympathy are very different,” she said. “I think it’s very easy to sympathize with people, and I think it’s kind of natural human instinct to a certain extent, but empathy is working to understand the lives of others, and building off of that. Making an effort to really help those people that you’re trying to empathize with is another level.”

Eleanor sees a future career in medicine as a way to connect with others.

“I am motivated by the desire to make an impact, but I’ve never really been into making a large scale impact like saying, ‘Oh, I want my name to be remembered when I’m gone.’ I think it’s more one-on-one, like having someone say to me, ‘Wow, you’ve helped me in a way that I could only ever hope for,’ and I think that’s kind of why I want to be a doctor or a surgeon. At a very basic level, I just want to be able to help someone and do good.”

In junior year, Eleanor realized that her desire to get along with others made her lose sight of her own personal identity.

“I think the biggest thing I was forgetting to think about is what I truly believed in,” she said. “Even though I guess I’m pretty sociable, I think that made me scared to be opinionated because I didn’t want to rub anyone the wrong way. Because I was so scared of voicing my opinion, it just turned into a point where I didn’t really have any opinions. For a while, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m just taking everyone into account,’ but eventually, I realized it was just me escaping the possibility of not being liked by everyone.”

Over the past year, she has become more confident voicing her own opinions.

“I think I’ve always shown a lot of compassion even when I was young, and I think being that compassionate has made me lose my own priorities because I’ve always prioritized the happiness of other people,” she said. “It’s taken me awhile to realize that I need to find my own values and my own morals before I can even consider those of others. I think just being grounded and being comfortable with who I am has been something that I’ve noticed I’ve had issues with and have been working to overcome.”