Liam Knox and David Yaffe-Bellany, High School North students and contributors to the WW-P News, gathered some intriguing answers when they asked fellow students what they had done over the summer. Their report:
#b#Sanchaya Satish#/b#
In 2006, as part of a post-9/11 effort to cultivate a generation of future diplomats, the United States Department of State established the National Security Language Initiative for Youth: a scholarship program that pays for American high school students to study in foreign countries.
This summer, Sanchaya Satish, a junior at North who secured a National Security Language scholarship after a rigorous application process, spent eight weeks in China, where she took language classes, toured Shanghai, and “made it a personal goal to talk to as many people as I could.” Satish said that she has a “passion for learning languages” and wanted to visit China because of its “burgeoning economy and role in the world stage.”
Before her trip, Satish — who studies Spanish at North and also speaks Tamil, a South-Indian language — didn’t know a word of Chinese. But the trip was about more than just learning a new language: “I was very independent and I had to make all of the decisions myself,” Satish said. “[I had to] give people a good impression of where I came from.”
Satish lived with a host family — a “jocular” father, an “extremely sweet” mother, and a daughter with whom Satish “immediately bonded.” The family “took me in as their second daughter,” Satish said, and explained, among other things, Chinese dinner etiquette. In China, for example, placing chopsticks in a rice bowl is a spiritual act reserved for honoring dead ancestors. “Throughout the trip I felt that [the host family] accepted me as if I was their own kid,” Satish said. “Their house became a home to me on the other side of the world.”
By the end of her stay, Satish had learned enough Chinese to have “full conversations” with her host mother. “We would sometimes stay up a little late just talking, which was a huge accomplishment for me,” Satish said.
Satish said she came to appreciate the “duality” at the heart of Chinese culture: the tension between rampant modernization and traditional values. Shanghai “can definitely give American skylines a run for their money,” Satish said, “but its cultural roots are still held strong by the people.”
Satish, who lives in West Windsor with her parents, Satish Srinivasan and Sangeetha Satish, and her sister, Sanjana, has represented North in several academic competitions, including Science Olympiad and National History Day. She is interested in eventually working for an international aid group like Doctors Without Borders, since “traveling and getting a real sense of culture would be one of the most prominent aspects of my career.”
#b#Jonathan Gelb#/b#
Jonathan Gelb, a junior at High School North, received a magic kit for his third birthday and promptly tore it to pieces. Gelb, who this summer completed an internship at a national magic convention in Las Vegas, has since learned to handle playing cards and plastic wands with a little more finesse. Over the past few years he has performed magic tricks in hospitals, nursing homes, and as a “Star of Tomorrow” at an event sponsored by the Society of American Magicians.
In early August Gelb worked behind the scenes at Magic: Live!, an annual convention run by Magic Magazine that is “similar in form to a TED Talk,” Gelb said, with visiting magicians giving lectures and demonstrations.
Gelb particularly enjoyed “a great illusion” trick in which Yu Ho Jin, an award-winning magician, conjured playing cards from thin air and then made them change color.
During the four-day convention, Gelb established “lasting friendships with other interns,” networked with fellow magicians, and even scored a promotional photo-shoot. He also attended “an exclusive party” hosted by Chris Kenner, an assistant to world-famous magician David Copperfield. “Kenner’s house was magical,” Gelb said. “There were secret rooms, collections of rare movie memorabilia, and expensive pieces of modern art,” as well as “a flux capacitator from the movie Back to the Future.”
Gelb, who lives in West Windsor with his parents, Jeffrey and Marci, and his brother, Scott, has acted in several high school plays. He wants to become a professional magician because he is “passionate about the art” and loves to perform.
#b#Tenriaji Sjamsu#/b#
At the end of June, the National Parent Teacher Association hosted its first ever PTA Youth Leadership Summit, in Cincinnati. Tenriaji Sjamsu, a junior at High School South who lives in West Windsor with his parents, Andi and Cynthia, attended the summit, along with 49 other high school students from across the country.
Sjamsu, who helps run school clubs like Future Problem Solvers and Relay for Life at South, said that he “saw the event as truly up my alley. I’ve developed and continue to cultivate in my own life a strong penchant for leadership, and I saw a lot of appeal in meeting students from all over the country who felt the same way.”
The summit consisted mainly of panels and seminars — what Sjamsu describes as an “all-work-no-play” schedule — in which participants discussed ways to combat school bullying. “I felt considerably more educated about the reality of the situation,” Sjamsu said. “I had never experienced bullying on any sort of grand scale firsthand.”
Speakers at the summit promoted a philosophy called the “five pillars of leadership:” welcoming and inclusiveness, effective listening, gaining a team consensus, inspiring others to act, and resiliency and resolve. “I was able to walk away with skills applicable to many different kinds of school issues,” Sjamsu said.
The summit has not added to Sjamsu’s leadership ambition — he already participates in a number of extracurricular activities. However, Sjamsu said that the summit will help him continue to excel as treasurer of the Future Problem Solvers club and vice president of the High School South Orchestra Council. “I think that going forward from an event like this I’ll always be able to reflect on my experiences,” Sjamsu said, “and strive to work just a little bit harder.”
#b#Brice Huang#/b#
Each February the American Mathematics Contest issues two 25-question, 75-minute multiple-choice exams, called the AMC 10/12. The exams, which are notoriously difficult to pass, cover a multitude of topics — everything from geometry to pre-calculus. Last winter High School North junior Brice Huang didn’t just pass his exam; his performance earned him a spot in Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program.
According to the AMC website, the summer program, held in June at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, prepared “students for possible participation” on Team USA at the International Mathematical Olympiad. To Huang, however, it was “more of a gathering of people who were passionate about math than it was a competition.”
The testing — four-hour exams roughly every other day — “definitely played a secondary role to the social activities and overall spirit of collaboration and friendship,” he said.
The program offered Huang a welcome break from the high-pressure environment of WW-P classrooms. “The lack of the pressure to have to do better than everyone else made all the social events — the singing troupe and the excursion to the local farmers’ market, to name a few — really enjoyable, and I made many new friends,” he said.
The Olympiad is by no means Huang’s sole academic achievement: he takes high-level math courses at North and in middle school performed admirably in MathCounts, another math tournament. Huang does not yet know whether he will compete for Team USA in next summer’s International Math Olympiad in Johannesburg. But, then again, the competition was only ever one small part of an experience that Huang described as enlightening.
“I definitely came out of MOP with a much stronger interest in math than I had going in,” he said. Which, for a student like Brice Huang, is saying something.
