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Christina Williams, still basking in her selection to the European Union Youth Sounding Board, has one message for her fellow Jamaicans - "Take a chance on yourself because you never know who could be watching and could give you an opportunity to strive."Known for her tremendous work as president of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Guild, Williams was among 25 young people selected from a list of more than 4,000 applicants from over 150 countries for the prestigious EU programme.On its website Youth Sounding Board explains that it is "a space for young people to have an influence on the EU's external action through its international partnerships".Members of the board play an advisory role to both EU Commissioner Jutta Urpilainen and the directorate general for international partnerships and help make EU action more participatory, relevant and effective for young people in EU partner countries.Williams, who shared that she had applied just hours before the deadline, is convinced that her work, when she was guild president, and in other fields locally, influenced the selection committee."You have persons within the 25 members who, when you Google them, they have blue ticks beside their names on social media because they are at that high level. Young people should take a chance on themselves. Every person has a skill or a talent. If I didn't take a chance on myself, I wouldn't be able to tell you today that I am one of the lucky ones chosen out of 4,000-plus people, despite the [novel coronavirus] pandemic and the fact I did not go to any Ivy League institution," Williams said."I go to the best institution in the Caribbean, but there were people there who were coming from top schools like Harvard, Yale, and Oxford universities and people who have a lot more years of experience. Some of these people are on special boards in their government, but this young, simple girl from Portland, Jamaica, was able to just rely on the work that she did," she said."I just applied strictly based on the work I did a UWI, Mona Guild and how I helped students. I spoke about work I have done with young people living with HIV. I started an emergency fund with UWI Def. The team and I spent about $4 million to feed students stuck on campus due to border closures in the beginning of the pandemic. We provided transportation for students back to their parishes free of cost. We reached out to Trinidad, for example, to say send a charter plane. We did a lot of work around COVID-19," she explained."The World Happiness Foundation gives out awards to people who ensure development in communities and countries across the world and I actually won that award because of the work I was doing with students during COVID-19. That also assisted me because I was able to show that the work I was doing locally was being regarded globally," she said, adding that young people should believe their work on the local stage can have global impact.Williams, who is studying law at The UWI, said all members of the EU Youth Sounding Board, who are between ages 18 and 30, will partner to bring issues of pertinent global concern to the attention of the EU Commission for possible action."With the issue in Afghanistan, we have a platform to say to the EU that we are seeing women and girls once again being at the mercy of the Taliban, and if it is that we see an issue and we want to help, we have the platform to say that to the EU. We don't speak officially for the EU, but what we do is influence their decision-making," Williams said."What we are allowed to do is work with other international groups like the United Nations and local and international NGOs. There are a lot of opportunities for us to do extensive work without just saying we are relying on the EU Commission. That's where we pull most of our power from, but we also have the opportunity to work with other international groups to get the causes that we have resolved," she said.