Claudia Cambounet is drawn to the questions that resist easy answers. A 16-year-old student, aspiring engineer, pianist, and fencer, she approaches the world the way she approaches a problem set: by breaking it down, looking for the underlying structure, and asking why things work the way they do. In her winning analytical essay, she turned that instinct on a question many young people are asked but few are given the space to examine: Can young people truly make a difference?

Claudia’s perspective is shaped by movement between worlds. She is French but grew up in Shanghai, where she lived for 12 years. “I grew up between two different education systems, two social environments, and just completely different worlds,” she says, “which I think definitely impacted me a lot.” Today, she is in her senior year of high school, studying in the French system with a specialization in math, physics, and chemistry, a demanding path that suits her curiosity.

That analytical streak runs through the rest of her life. Claudia has played the piano for 11 years, calling it “a really important part of [her] life,” and she loves sports, especially fencing. She hopes to become an engineer, drawn to the idea of breaking problems down and turning ideas into impactful systems.

That same interest in how systems really work is at the heart of her winning essay, titled “The Distortion of Youth Empowerment: When Agency Becomes a Performance,” which argues that youth empowerment today is highly visible and widely celebrated, yet often strikingly ineffective. Claudia’s view is that young people are constantly told they have power, but being praised is not the same as being powerful. “Today’s ‘empowerment’ offers visibility, not power,” she writes. She opens with a line from philosopher Hannah Arendt on “the impotence of power,” a paradox she says she watched unfold in real time.

The moment came in 2019, when Claudia, then nine or ten, followed the “Fridays for Future” movement started by Greta Thunberg. At her international school, climate change was a central topic, and seeing students mobilize around the world felt like an answer. “I just felt so much hope,” she remembers. But weeks later, world leaders gathered for the UN Climate Action Summit, and the world’s major emitters made no significant commitments. Watching that hope give way to disappointment was, in her words, “heartbreaking,” and it was the first time she understood what powerlessness meant.

Her own move between countries gave that realization shape. In China, she writes, youth achievement is celebrated, yet independent collective action is not permitted and participation takes place within school-supervised structures. In France, students debate, organize, and protest freely, but that visibility rarely becomes influential. What struck her most was that two very different political systems produced a similar result. She had assumed the differences were political but, over time, she came to see that empowerment depends less on ideology than on who holds decision-making power. Living in both also taught her adaptability, which she sees as essential in a world “constantly changing with innovation or the people that surround us.”

One finding hit close to home: adults often treat agency as individual effort, which turns structural barriers into personal blame. “If you want to be heard, just speak louder” is the message, Claudia says, but “we feel like we’re already speaking as loud as we can, but because of our position or our environment, we just can’t be heard.”

Her interest in who gets heard, and who gets access, is not only theoretical. Growing up in China, she saw how unequal educational opportunities could be, and as a child her family would fund a student’s studies for a year.. “I’ve really grown up in this environment of learning to really try and help people who don’t have my luck,” she reflects. Today she volunteers in her community, helping organize breakfasts for people experiencing homelessness. Being able to connect with people, she says, is “just so important to keeping our humanity in a world that’s so digital and constantly changing.”

Claudia does not stop at critique. Her essay takes on the claims that youth are simply apathetic and that figures like Malala Yousafzai prove young people can drive global change, arguing that such activists are exceptional rather than representative and that apparent disengagement may reflect a narrow definition of politics. Using Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation, she shows how most youth initiatives stall at tokenism, where being consulted does not translate into influence. Her solutions are concrete: participatory co-design, where young people and adults work as equal partners, and deliberative mini-publics, randomly selected assemblies in which young people hold real institutional influence.

Her conclusion is a reframing. “For years, I believed speaking up meant having a say,” she writes. “Today I believe empowerment lies in the power to shape outcomes.” Young people are often praised as the “leaders of tomorrow,” a phrase she argues denies them power today. Agency, she concludes, “is not a promise but a condition”: young people can make a difference only when the systems around them let their actions matter now.

Her advice to other young people reflects the same balance of realism and resolve: “It’s really important to try and observe and think critically.” Empowerment may not be simply handed to young people, she says, but that does not mean they should stop fighting for it. “We’re just limited by these structures,” she adds, “but that doesn’t mean that we have to limit ourselves to these structures.”

In a world full of celebrations of youth, Claudia Cambounet offers something harder and more valuable: a clear look at the difference between being praised and being powerful, and a conviction that the gap between the two is worth closing.

See her category-winning submission here.