On one school meeting last October, Sumati Wadhwa (12) and Joel Morel (10) announced the achievements of the choir program. Photos and photos of Regional Honor Choir students appeared in quick succession, arranged side-by-side in the slideshow presentation. And finally, after a pause, the slide changed to reveal a singular photo of a smiling Millie Lin (12). She had earned a spot in National Honor Choir, and with it a slide of her own.

“[Singing] can be transcendent, especially when you’re in a choral environment,” Millie said. “There’s hundreds of other people singing with you, you’re one voice of many and you can hear them all around you and it’s in perfect harmony, and you float out of your body because it’s so beautiful.”

But more than the music she sings, what Millie loves about choir is the sense of collaboration.

“One of the cool things about choral music is that there’s all these different styles,” she said. “Choir is very diverse — you can travel through music. When you’re exploring new perspectives, it makes me feel really awake. Especially when you do it with other people, you feel their energy, their momentum, the collaboration.”

Millie also finds opportunities to work with others in another environment: honor council.

“I think about honor a lot, especially how to foster discussions about it. An interesting question is, why should people believe or follow honor if it’s something that might not benefit you, personally, in the short-term?” she said. “But more, it’s just some interesting questions. In my opinion, when students vote you into a position, they’re going to trust you to be thoughtful about it, and to have a more developed perspective, and be able to look at them fairly and to be able to understand their perspectives too. We’ve handled real cases, and to be one of the people who can evaluate cases, to be chosen by the students as one of those people, I think it’s a responsibility. It’s what you were elected to think about.”

When Millie shares her thoughts with others, she approaches the topic with the intent of creating a discussion, not a debate.

“Even for very polarized issues, like when the election happened, she published this beautiful piece on Facebook about how maybe there was a fault in how we’ve been approaching the way we get our sources of information,” her close friend Divija Bhimaraju (12) said.

Her Spanish teacher Abel Olivas also appreciates her open mindedness.

“She takes in other people’s comments and ruminates over them and then comes out with her own opinions,” her Olivas said. “It’s a very calm and reflective approach. She’s observing what others are saying instead of just saying, ‘Boom, this is what I believe!’ and clinging to it, and arguing it. It’s almost like she rises above, or has evolved beyond, that approach.”

While many students stop taking a language after they fulfill the requirement, Millie has taken Spanish all four years of high school. She feels genuinely curious about the “colorful” language and studies it with fervor, hoping to study abroad one day.

“She doesn’t give simplistic interpretation when we’re analyzing the literature together in class,” Olivas said. “It’s like she can see the various dimensions of a niche. And the various signs and she just kind of sifts through those books, those dimensions and it’s just very thoughtful.”

But despite the depth of her ideas, Millie’s tone of voice conveys a touch of lightheartedness. When she says something that seems esoteric or overly intellectual, her voice adopts a satirically haughty accent that seems to frame her words in quotation marks.

“She’s a normal person who definitely has a very strong internal moral compass, but she’s also willing to go out and adventure and learn new things and grow and change and evolve as a person,” Divija said.

While often serious or pensive, Millie has her own sense of humor. She bought a Venus fly trap for no particular reason; she took up the ukulele one summer. Occasionally, she spontaneously breaks into song. Her younger brother, Jason Lin (9), described her as “energetic” and “outward.”

“Even when she’s drowning in work and has tons of tests the next day, she always helps me do my stuff,” Jason said. “She might help me do a little bit of homework; I give her food; she gives me food, we encourage each other to do better.”

Millie derives her empathy from a desire for discourse.

“I have this one idea that every idea has a reason for existing,” she said. “And these ideas, in context of your experience, can be true, can be accurate, no matter how strange or how foreign they are. I really like to hear these ideas. I like to not necessarily appreciate them, or love them, I just really want to understand them.”