arlingtonmagazine.com
Arlington Magazine Extraordinary Teen Awards 2022
Potomac School graduate and Thinkabit Lab intern, inventor Benjamin Choi. Photo by Skip Brown.
When pandemic lab shutdowns scuttled his plans for a research project on aluminum fuel in the summer of 2020, Benjamin Choi pivoted to a new idea that he could work on from home, using a 3-D printer—a prosthetic arm for amputees that could be controlled by brain signals. He had seen a documentary about mind-controlled prosthetic limbs in third grade and was convinced he could design one that was not only less expensive, but also less invasive.
His prototype, recently featured in Smithsonian Magazine, costs $300 to produce and uses external sensors on the head (in lieu of surgical implants) to
“I really like the idea of building things,” says the McLean resident, who turns 18 in June. “It’s personally impactful to build things that help people.”
Most students with demanding course loads take copious notes. Choi doesn’t take notes; he commits lectures to memory.
A straight-A student with the highest GPA in his class at The Potomac School, he has a clear affinity for science, but his interests also extend beyond science. He plays first violin with the American Youth Philharmonic Orchestras, captained his school’s varsity squash team, and has had his fiction and essays recognized in the 89th annual Writer’s Digest Literary Awards, Fiction Southeast and The New York Times.
After earning admission to Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford, he has chosen to enroll at Harvard. He says he may want to become a college professor someday.
“I’m a little bit of an obsessive person,” Choi says. “It’s a double-edged sword. I can do a lot, but sometimes I can get a little carried away.”
His mom, Erin Cho, an attorney, says her son has always been insatiably curious. He started reading at age 2 and drawing the world’s continents at 4.
“He wants to know everything about everything. He pursues things at 150 miles an hour,” she says. “There’s nothing that doesn’t interest him.”
Page 2
Yorktown graduate Zoe Davis with Jack, a rescue dog from the Animal Welfare League of Arlington. Photo by Michael Ventura.
As an honors student at Yorktown, Zoe Davis was a cheerleader, a member of the debate team and a Black Student Union club leader. She was a representative for Virginia Girls State, a service program of The American Legion Auxiliary that helps veterans and military families. As a sophomore, she and two friends successfully petitioned their school to add a class on African American history.
But there were times when she missed weeks of school. Davis has sickle cell anemia, a hereditary disorder that disproportionately affects Black people. It causes her red blood cells to contort into crescent-moon shapes that block the flow of blood through her veins, resulting in debilitating pain. This, too, was part of her high school experience. She remembers finishing up an SAT prep class online from her hospital bed.
So it’s no surprise that she is also a stalwart advocate for others with sickle cell anemia. As Senior Teen President of the Northern Virginia Chapter of Jack and Jill of America, which provides educational and cultural opportunities for African American children, Davis was asked to share her sickle cell journey for the chapter’s annual 5K race, which this year raised more than $14,000 for sickle cell advocacy, awareness and research. She was thrilled to share her story of perseverance while amplifying the need for more sickle cell research funding and greater access to quality care for sickle cell patients.
“Zoe is determined to show that no matter what’s thrown at you, you’re going to push through,” says Juanice Jenkins, a guidance counselor at Yorktown. “It’s an innate perseverance.”
Davis is also passionate about animals. She has five dogs of her own, spent a summer as a veterinary intern at Caring Hands Animal Hospital in Clarendon, and rounded out high school with a class in veterinary science at the Arlington Career Center, where she studied snakes, dogs, cats, gerbils, ferrets, rats, guinea pigs and frogs. (The rats were her favorites, she says, because they’re lovable and easy to train.)
This fall, she plans to study animal science and computer science at North Carolina A&T State University with the goal of becoming a veterinarian who works with domestic and exotic animals.
As someone who can be struck with pain at any moment, she holds a special kind of empathy for creatures that may be in pain, too.
“I’ve grown up sick my whole life, but I’ve had the privilege of being able to tell people what I need,” says the 18-year-old. “Animals can seem fine on the outside, but on the inside they could be in pain [with no way] to express it. When I see others in distress, the first thing I want to do is help.”
Page 3
McLean High School graduate Luke Valencic. Photo by Michael Ventura.
For as long as he can remember, Luke Valencic has been entranced by outer space. In elementary school, he’d dress up as an astronaut for Halloween and request space-related books for Christmas.
An engineering camp the summer after his sophomore year of high school is what propelled him to build his first rocket, from a kit. “I saw the results you can have with relatively little time and money,” says the McLean resident. “It opened the doors to all the crazy projects I do now.”
Valencic’s next rocket, built from scratch, held a mini computer with an SD card, sensors and a battery that enabled him to monitor the rocket’s altitude, temperature, acceleration and velocity. He describes that prototype as “super over-engineered and impractical, but it was much more satisfying using one of my creations rather than going out and buying someone else’s.”
As a junior, he joined the National Association of Rocketry, a nationwide hobbyist group, and earned its Level 1 certification by designing a 9-foot-high fiberglass rocket that weighed 8 pounds and flew to a height of 1,200 feet. He’s now working on his Level 2 certification, which requires a rocket that can fly higher and withstand increasing aerodynamic forces. He also designed a high-altitude balloon with a GPS system and cameras to take atmospheric weather readings at 90,000 feet. It flew for three hours over the Shenandoah Valley before landing in the backyard of a house.
Between his various space projects, Valencic, 18, is pretty grounded. A four-year member of McLean High School’s tennis team, he coaches tennis at the Chesterbrook Swim & Tennis Club. During the pandemic, he took up guitar and taught himself how to record and edit music. He graduated with a 4.46 GPA.
“[Luke] is someone who can grasp things very quickly, but when he does struggle to understand things, he’ll work at it until he does,” says his AP physics teacher, Jeff Brocketti. “It’s the willingness to work at it that’s somewhat unique.”
Valencic plans to attend Georgia Tech in the fall, where he’ll study aerospace engineering. Not much seems to intimidate him, except—of all things—flying. “Going on an airplane scares me a lot, ironic as it sounds,” he says. “I guess because I know all the things that can go wrong.”
Page 4
Langley High School graduate and social activist Nadia Malik. Photo by Michael Ventura.
By the time she turned 18 in March, Nadia Malik was already a serial activist. Her instincts were first revealed in 2018, when, as an eighth-grader, she was bothered by the uneaten food she saw her fellow students throwing away. She started an organization called DIVVY, which donates unused food (think apples and oranges) from school cafeterias to local food banks and homeless shelters.
Malik later expanded the organization to her high school, Langley, and has gotten inquiries about starting a chapter at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County.
Her next light-bulb moment came during the early months of the pandemic when schools were closed. Feeling isolated and desperate to make a difference, she created a volunteer group for teens in Northern Virginia. Teens United launched in the spring of 2020 with a modest mission: free delivery of essentials such as groceries and prescription medications to the elderly and immunocompromised people, as well as front-line workers who didn’t have the time to run errands. Word spread, and by June of that year the group had established a second chapter in Florida.
Today, Teens United runs five campaigns—focusing on Covid-19, injustice, mental illness, climate change and inequity in education—with more than 2,000 volunteers across the U.S., and in Afghanistan, India and China. Designed as a hub for youth activism, Teens United partners with groups such as Cancer Kids First and Generation She to match teen volunteers with projects like beach cleanups and food drives.
As the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan and Poland, Malik grew up hearing the stories of how her parents came to America with nothing and eventually became real-estate agents. She says tales of strong women on both sides of her family fueled her desire to succeed.
At Langley, she maintained a 4.5 GPA while taking dual-enrollment entrepreneurship classes at Northern Virginia Community College. Her teacher Shelly Gaffin describes her as one of the most motivated students she has ever had: “She presents herself as an adult. You’d never know on the phone or through written correspondence that she’s [a teen].”
Malik plans to attend the University of Michigan this fall and major in business and biology.
Page 5
Wakefield High School graduate and multimedia artist Will Parker IV. Photo by Skip Brown.
Will Parker was in first grade when he received his first art commission. His former preschool teacher asked him to draw a dragon and offered to pay him $5 for it. He happily obliged.
“That was a sign for me that I was really talented in art,” says the Arlington teen, who counts the Cartoon Network, DC Comics and video game animation among his early influences.
One of his fondest childhood memories is drawing alongside his father, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. They bonded over pictures of cars and planes.
Parker’s creative drive continued through high school, culminating in a series of regional Scholastic Art awards. Much of his work focuses on nature and people from different cultures or ancient civilizations, rendered in watercolor, gouache and ink.
“When I’m in the zone [drawing], the focus brings me peace,” says the 18-year-old, whose paintings have also been featured in juried exhibitions at Marymount University and the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland.
He graduated as an AP Scholar with Honor and now heads to the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he wants to major in illustration or animation. He recently began teaching himself to work in digital media.
Parker has other talents, too. He has taken piano lessons since fifth grade and won third place in Arlington County’s 2020 regional science fair, for a project that gauged the effect of music frequencies on chia-seed plants.
He was a member of Wakefield’s track team and Spanish Honor Society, finishing high school with a 4.18 GPA.
His AP Art teacher, Margot Shteir-Dunn, calls him a “wise soul” whose insight is always astute. “When he asks for constructive feedback, I can feel he’s really absorbing what I’m saying,” she says. “He really takes the time to make meaningful connections between his artwork’s theme and tone.”
Page 6
Arlington Tech graduate, Latin scholar and future public health advocate Antonia Jara Romero. Photo by Michael Ventura.
Antonia Jara Romero grew up on her grandparents’ farm in Cotacachi, a rural town in the Andes mountains of Ecuador, where the nearest hospital was 90 minutes away. Residents sometimes came to her grandmother, Graciela Dominguez, to get treatment for injuries and conditions such as parasites in babies.
At 10 years old, Jara Romero was tasked with boiling water, plucking herbs to make tea and taking blood pressure readings from people in need of care. Sometimes farmworkers suffered serious accidents and had to be driven to the hospital in the family car.
“One time a man came in and had been in a tractor accident,” recalls the teen, now 18. “I have a memory of my grandmother holding his [lacerated] leg. It made me more aware of how people fall through the cracks of health care. There are people who don’t have access.”
Those memories of treating people, sometimes for conditions that were preventable, stayed with Jara Romero when she moved to Arlington with her siblings and parents in seventh grade. She spoke little English at the time. But by high school, at Arlington Tech, she was pursuing dual-enrollment classes at Northern Virginia Community College (where she expects to graduate in July with an associate degree in science).
This fall, she plans to study public health at William & Mary. She hopes eventually to return to Ecuador to address the gaps in its health care system.
“As a first-generation English language learner, [Antonia] really set the pathway for other students to achieve their dreams,” says Monica Lozano-Caldera, the equity and excellence coordinator at Arlington Tech. “She has an internally driven motivation to succeed.”
Jara Romero won three gold medals for top scores on the National Latin Exam, finishing high school with a 3.89 GPA. She was a member of Arlington Tech’s Ultimate Frisbee team and helped start a chapter of HOSA-Future Health Professionals at her school. HOSA is a global student-led organization that promotes careers in the health care industry.
“What Ecuador really needs—and other developing countries—is to focus more on prevention…because we don’t have enough money to treat everyone,” she says. “Everyone deserves access to health care.”
Page 7
Meridian High School graduate, Falls Church City Historical Commission member and numismatist Hunter Hicks. Photo by Skip Brown.
Hunter Hicks was 10 when he visited an antiques store, noticed a display case filled with silver-looking pennies and decided to buy one from 1943. Turns out it was made of zinc-coated steel—because copper and nickel were needed for the war effort at the time it was minted.
“I didn’t realize how much history was connected with coins,” says the 18-year-old, whose vast collection now includes an Athenian Owl coin from ancient Greece and a mint-condition Lincoln cent dating to 1922 in its original doily holder.
“I really liked the idea of having something that was valued by so many previous people.”
Recognized as a Numismatic Scholar by the American Numismatic Association, Hicks has received scholarships to attend coin conventions across the country and spent more than two years working as a numismatist for Wayne Herndon Rare Coins in Chantilly.
If high school is a time of conformity, this Falls Church teen was always determined to chart his own path. He started a Hat Club at Meridian, declaring every Friday “hat day” and giving away a few hats every week. He then took that crusade to Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School next door, where he lobbied administrators to rescind the school’s no-hat policy (and succeeded).
Hicks managed the girls’ field hockey, basketball and lacrosse teams at Meridian, and is now training to become an emergency medical technician. “I’ve always looked for unique experiences,” he says. “I’m not going to do the thing that everyone else does; I look for what I think would be fun.”
He’s also naturally inclined to help others. When schools closed early in the pandemic, he began scheduling video meetings with special-needs students who were having a hard time with the isolation. He tutored classmates in math and, as class president, led weekly meal preparations at a local homeless shelter. He is a voting member of the Falls Church City Historical Commission.
“He has so many interests and pursues them all with passion,” says Marybeth Connelly, a member of the Falls Church City Council. “He’s humble and he’s kind and he thinks about other people. I find that remarkable.”
Hicks graduated with a 4.3 GPA and will attend Stanford University in the fall.
Page 8
Washington-Liberty graduate and social justice advocate Kimiko Reed. Photo by Michael Ventura.
As an International Baccalaureate (IB) candidate at W-L, Kimiko Reed made an unsettling observation: The more advanced classes she took, the fewer students of color she saw.
Sometimes she was the only student of color in her class. She grew frustrated every time she had to explain why she felt racism was the most pressing issue in the U.S., or why certain comments about people of color were hurtful. When protests erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s death, she felt she had to do something.
“I realized that me being silent about microaggressions and macroaggressions was an act of conformity,” says Reed, 18, who is biracial. “I thought that this was probably happening to other people like me.” So she founded Students for Racial Equity, a community-wide youth organization dedicated to empowering culturally and linguistically diverse students. After interviewing students of color about their experiences, she led professional development workshops for some 95 educators aimed at removing barriers to student learning.
The program expanded to include 45 student ambassadors representing high schools in Arlington and Fairfax counties. A $500 grant from the Arlington Youth Philanthropy Initiative paid for a website and a Zoom subscription.
“Kimi has this doggedness about her,” says Elizabeth Burgos, W-L’s resource teacher for gifted students. “She’s kind, compassionate and empathetic.”
Reed also served as vice president of her school’s Math Honor Society, recruiting tutors for struggling students and applying the equity lens in that context, too. Upon hearing about a minority student who was failing precalculus during Covid because she didn’t know how to access the online textbook, Reed intervened and talked to the girl’s counselor. Within a week the student had the textbook. Her grade shot up to an A.
Reed finished her senior year with a 4.47 GPA and now heads to Columbia University to study biomedical engineering. She’s fascinated by the idea of using gene editing to address racial disparities in the treatment of certain diseases—an interest she says was sparked by her father’s prostate cancer diagnosis. (Black men in the U.S. have a greater chance of developing prostate cancer and are more likely to die from it.)
“The impact in my own family,” she says, “made me realize that better treatments are an important form of social justice advocacy.”
Page 9
Bishop O’Connell graduate and international cycling phenom Tobias Klein. Photo by Skip Brown.
Toby Klein went pro before he was old enough to vote. His high school years at Bishop O’Connell were a blur of studying, training and traveling the globe for bike races, with little time for other activities. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
“There’s so much suffering and so much sacrifice involved in this sport, but so much joy and euphoria,” he says. “Cycling for me is a form of meditation. It’s a really good stress reliever and sort of my getaway.”
Klein started cycling at age 9, bonding with his dad, Marc, on bike trips. His first road race was the annual Armed Forces Cycling Classic in Arlington (he came in second place in the kids’ race for his age group).
By his freshman year in high school, he had a coach. He began competing at the elite level, racking up trophies in the USA Cycling Amateur Road National Championships and earning third place last summer in the Trophy of Flanders, an international race in Belgium.
In September 2021, he signed a pro contract with Aevolo, a professional cycling team based in Colorado Springs that provides a stipend and equipment and covers his travel expenses. He sandwiched the interview for this story between tours in France and New Mexico and has raced in Greece and Italy.
The rigorous schedule didn’t stop him from paying it forward. In high school, he helped promote the benefits of exercise through Project Echelon, a nonprofit that helps disabled veterans recover from PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
Now 18, Klein graduated with a 4.43 GPA and was accepted to William & Mary, but he’s planning to defer a few years to focus on cycling. Once his racing days are over, he intends to pursue a career in finance.
Tracey Leipold, director of counseling at Bishop O’Connell, was struck by the Arlington teen’s maturity. He met all of his academic obligations, kept up with assignments on the road and rarely asked for extensions, she says, while logging thousands of miles on two wheels.
“One of Toby’s great gifts is he’s a super humble guy,” she says. “He is really respectful and grateful for opportunities. He shows the other students what can be possible.”
Page 10
Yorktown High School graduate, track star and future surgeon Anna Corcoran. Photo by Skip Brown.
Math has always come naturally to Anna Corcoran. She took intensified algebra in sixth grade and intensified precalculus as a freshman at Yorktown. By the time she was a senior, she’d taken every accelerated math class the school had to offer. She never turned in an assignment late and earned straight A’s throughout high school.
Add in the fact that she is a nationally ranked runner, a member of the French Honor Society and co-founder of Yorktown’s Cancer Club. It’s not surprising that her math teacher and track coach, Kevin Robertson, calls her “a second-to-none individual.”
“Anna was one of the most spectacular students I’ve ever had in terms of intelligence,” Robertson says. “And I know that she will bring it every time she walks up to that [starting] line. Since freshman year, she has been one of the fiercest competitors on the track.”
A sprinter at Williamsburg Middle School who later took up cross-country at Yorktown, Corcoran takes after her father, Daniel, who ran track at MIT. “It was a really fun culture, and everyone was supportive,” she says of her school’s running teams. “One of my favorite parts is cheering everyone on.”
Corcoran graduated with a 4.44 GPA and will run track for Duke this fall, where she plans to study medicine with the goal of becoming a surgeon.
Outside of sports, she raised more than $20,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society—a cause that is close to her heart because her grandmother battled thyroid and skin cancer. At Yorktown, she co-founded Patriots Against Cancer, a club that serves as a support group for students whose families have been affected by cancer. Club members also write supportive letters to hospitalized children who are undergoing treatment, as well as to the nurses and the doctors who take care of them.
At 18, Corcoran is driven, but cautions others against trying to be perfect. She says her perfectionism was a problem for years. “When I was younger, I would set really high goals and it was really hard when I wouldn’t reach them,” she says. “Then I realized a lot of people mess up, and that’s how you grow and become a better person.”
No comments:
Post a Comment