ALL TALENT ACADEMY

Tiffany Zhang is currently a student at The Taft School, a private high school located in Watertown, Connecticut. She started playing piano when she was three years old, and started learning with Mrs. Zhang at six years old. Learning piano has changed Tiffany’s life entirely, and has made her into who she is today. A huge aspect of Tiffany’s character is her creativity, whether it is in musical art, visual art, or literature. However, she fully credits her discovery of her creative personality to her piano career. Especially when she was very young, Tiffany viewed piano as a form of expression that could articulate emotions clearer than words. Practicing piano has never been a task for her; instead, it acts as a form of relaxation and expression. One of her favorite times to practice piano is at night when it seems that everyone else in the world is asleep, and it is just her and the music. She can exaggerate the emotions in pieces to fit her own creative style and preference. This close relationship she has developed with piano has helped her discover what her creative style is and has also inspired her to branch out and try other musical art forms. Tiffany enjoys singing and playing the ukulele as well. She is very thankful  for being introduced to piano at such a young age as not only did it give her a creative outlet and pastime, but it also nurtured the growth of many other life skills, such as patience, endurance, and determination. Performing piano on so many different stages has taught her how to keep a clear and calm mind under stressful situations, which is a skill that not only benefits her music career, but also her academic career. This skill Tiffany has developed from piano allows her to participate at school and present speeches or presentations with confidence. Tiffany says, “Learning piano has changed my life: It has given me an emotional outlet, showed me who I am, and equipped me with a myriad of life skills.”

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Tiffany is a consistent high honor roll student at Taft. She is apart of the school’s audition choir, Collegium, with which she performed in Holy Trinity Church in London and American Cathedral in Paris in the summer of 2018. In 2019, Tiffany also competed in her annual school Talent Show, Taft’s Got Talent, and won first place after performing/singing a mashup duet while playing the ukulele. In the same year, Tiffany served as a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Fellow for Taft’s MLK Day Arts Celebration, and she was asked to perform a piano piece for the school-wide event, to which she received a standing ovation. Tiffany also serves as a tour guide for her school and has the opportunity to introduce herself and talk to visitors almost every week, and this year, she was chosen to speak on the Teaching and Learning Panel as a representative for her grade for Taft’s Admitted Student Day. In the Spring, she enjoys being apart of her school’s JV Golf team. 

In the Spring of 2019, Tiffany traveled on a school-sponsored service trip to the Dominican Republic (DR), where she was given the opportunity to serve as an English teacher for children in the developing DR. Tiffany says, “serving and interacting with children who speak a completely different language, participate in a different culture, and are raised with different values than I am completely shifted my perspective on life and education.”