2025 High School Winners

Khyati Boruah is in the 11th grade at Sarala Birla Gyan Jyoti in Guwahati, India. She found out about the World of 8 Billion student video contest when she was searching for student contest opportunities on the internet. Because she loves making videos, she decided to participate. Khyati chose to create a video on child wellbeing because she could relate to the topic as a young person herself. She knew some basics of population growth, including that India’s population was growing, but didn’t know any specific facts or figures. Something that surprised Khyati during her research was that teenage pregnancy is one of the reasons for population growth, so she wanted to create awareness with her video.

This was the first time Khyati created an educational video. She is inspired by the style of Studio Ghibli videos and learned a lot of video editing skills that she had not used in her personal videos. She used InShot which is a free app to help her with editing. The most challenging part of the process was remembering her lines, and she mentioned that her phone storage was completely full by the end. Even though it was only a one-minute video, she took a lot of time to film the individual clips. Khyati’s advice to future contest participants is to make sure you take the time you need for editing and try to be as innovative as possible. She shared that with storytelling, “the more creative it is, the easier it will be to emotionally connect to the audience.”

Khyati loves music, plays the guitar and the ukulele, and is also learning to juggle. She plays basketball and tennis as well. She loves spending time doing social work and participating in initiatives supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Khyati, along with her friend, recently won an award in the UN Media International competition with a poem on the SDGs that showed a contrast between the past and modern world. In her poem she compared how each of the SDGs focuses on fixing the challenges we face today. Khyati plans on using some of the money for fundraising to support some of those causes and also to fix her phone so she can make more videos in the future. Khyati plans on going into pre-med and is currently preparing for her medical entrance exam. She is passionate about child wellbeing issues and would like to continue to work on them even if she chooses another focus in the medical field.