Sabrina started posting videos on YouTube when she was 10 playing with her low-end camera just for fun. It was amazing to watch her over the years to continue to do this “fun thing” until, lo and behold, she unknowingly started to build a career of it. She didn’t realize that however because she came out seeking a job at Starbucks last year because that’s what everyone did at her age. Well, she’s still a typical teenager wanting to fit in to the traditional mold not aware of how she was in fact a career trendsetter.
She is an outlier, multi-talented teenager who created her own brand, built her following and got herself casted for Crash Course – an educational YouTube channel for kids. She was catapulted to “fame” when John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars) chose her out of 1600 auditions to play his spot on YouTube while on paternity leave. Her followers jumped, one of her posts was picked up by Huffington Post, and she was sought by CBC for a feature on geeks. She is featured in the current edition of Elle Canada as a high-achieving Gen Z.
Today, Sabrina is celebrating her 18th birthday, having accomplished so much more than a regular person would in an entire career – creating her brand in powerful teenage platform, getting paid while having fun, appearing on red carpets of and emceeing at YouTube video conferences in Los Angeles and Toronto, creating a big tribe of young followers, and being recognized as a young role model. And she is just getting started.
Off to university in September, she’s just won a $60,000 scholarship grant. She’s taking BS Math and aspires to work in the financial industry. Obviously, she still wants to follow a traditional career path. But I would wager that somewhere along the way, she’d follow her real passion and would reinvent herself to stand out because that’s what she does.
Happy 18th Birthday, Sabrina!
