Walking past the lunch tables, classrooms, or any lounge area on campus, if you catch sight of warm, smiling green eyes and hear a fruity, characteristic laugh, you’ve spotted Jenna Sadhu (12).

When Jenna isn’t laughing, she’s making other people laugh.

“I’m happy when I make other people happy, so if I’m able to help someone and make them happy, that fuels me,” Jenna said.

Much of what Jenna does in her day to day life is directed towards accomplishing her goal of making people happy. She channels part of this desire through charity, volunteering at the Montessori School of Los Altos as a teacher’s assistant for the past five years. At the school, she helps the young students with work and arts and crafts and leads them to playtime.

“It’s inspiring to get to touch these kids,” Jenna said. “I’m really interested in cognitive development and cognitive sciences, so being able to experience cognitive development first hand is something that’s really interesting to me.”

Jenna uses multimedia and creative writing as another outlet to make people happy. She does journal writing while immersed in nature and produces emotional and artistic works of poetry in her downtime. Initially signing up for journalism as a mistake her freshman year, Jenna found herself “falling in love” with the subject, becoming the Broadcast/Multimedia editor. Through the journalism department, Jenna spreads laughter co-hosting a humorous news commentary podcast “Get Skool’d.”

“It’s just been so fun to edit and create media and share my voice across different platforms, and I would not trade it for anything,” she said.

Ultimately, Jenna would like to pursue an integration of her interests in creative writing and multimedia.

“I want to move people with my media,” Jenna said. “I want to share it on different platforms, and I want people to just be like ‘wow.’ I love sharing my voice and my creativity with the world.”

Outside of her larger scale work in charity and in media, Jenna spreads smiles with her day-to-day compliments and politeness. From simply holding the door open and using manners to complimenting someone’s hair, Jenna finds joy in seeing the smiles she created on people’s faces. Though Jenna shares many compliments, they are all genuine; Jenna is notable for her candid honesty.

“It’s important to be real so people take you seriously and so people come to you with genuine questions for advice,” she said.

Her candidness also produces her humor. Cracking jokes to make serious situations less intense and just to spread happiness in general, Jenna can be found making all types of silly comments.

“Everyone around me needs to be constantly smiling and happy and giggling and bouncing off my energy,” Jenna said. “Otherwise, I didn’t do my job for the day.”

Ashna Chandra (12) has been close friends with Jenna from when they first met in elementary school.

“My best memories of Jenna are always just laughing at the lunch table and listening to her stupid stories, but they’ve always been the one thing I look forward to everyday when I come to school because I know she always has something interesting to say,” she said. “She’s definitely one of the strongest people I know. Despite everything that she goes through, she always has a smile on her face and always tries to make conversation with people.”

Charismatic, confident, punctual and organized, Jenna is a leader, not a follower. She pursues her own initiative to create, whether through her multimedia ventures or through creating seminar sessions on women’s wellness for the school.

“One night, Jenna, Meena, and I decided to spontaneously go to the Sacred Heart Carnival in Saratoga; we got away from school and just had the best time,” Abha Patkar (12), Jenna’s close friend, said. “She knows how to let go and have fun, and her presence just makes everyone laugh.”

Following her impulses, Jenna lives within each moment.

“You need to laugh loud, dance like no one’s watching, eat like it’s your last meal and enjoy the day like it’s your last day on earth,” she said.