ARLINGTON, VA – The 2024 National Rice Month Scholarship Video Contest Grand Prize Winner is Helen Lan, a graduating senior from Boerne, Texas. Her award-winning video,
The Tale of The Rice Ghost, was made with lots of determination, rice facts, and Lego bricks.
“It brought back fun childhood memories,” says Lan, who talks about her experience creating the video on
Episode 104 of
The Rice Stuff podcast. “My mom hated those premade Lego sets, so she always bought us random bricks, and I never got any of those cool sets, like the Millennium Falcon. The Legos were just sitting around for a long time because when I started high school I didn’t have much time for them anymore.”
Her mother’s insistence on Lego free-play paid off—Lan is set to graduate next year from Northside Health Careers High School in San Antonio, and aims to become a surgeon. She will put her scholarship toward a pre-med degree, and she has already applied to some prestigious institutions such as John Hopkins University.
She also supplements her rigorous magnet school curriculum by volunteering at local hospitals. And when she’s not studying or volunteering, she’s participating in her school’s nationally ranked Latin Club, or practicing music on the flute and the piano, which she has played since she was five years old.
Her diligence and creativity shines through in her video, which she created using stop-motion animation, a famously arduous and slow animation technique. The film took an entire day to complete, as she had to build the set pieces, take hundreds of photos, and edit them together. The result is a charming, tongue-in-cheek story about U.S. rice that draws its inspiration from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and The Lego Movie (2014).
In December, Helen traveled to Little Rock to attend the USA Rice Outlook Conference, where she received her award in person. For Helen, this scholarship not only marks a significant achievement but also a stepping stone toward her dreams of a career in medicine.
Scholarships were also awarded to second place winner Michaela Lirio from Corpus Christi, Texas, for her video,
Grains of Culture, and third place winner Madeleine Cheung of La Canada Flintridge, California, for her video,
The Sustainable Journey of Rice Agriculture.