Princeton High School senior Ren participates in hockey and cross country, but chemistry is her true love
By Scott Morgan
Stephanie Ren, a senior at Princeton High School, is someone who, despite her young age, already seems to have the kind of drive, direction and brains to make an incredibly good living for herself after she graduates from college.
This summer, while many of her peers hung out online, at the Xbox, or at the beach, Ren, 16, took her head for chemistry to Colorado and put it through the paces of the National Chemistry Olympiad, among other such mentally grueling events.
She barely missed out on going to Vietnam as a U.S. representative for the International Chemistry Olympiad, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
At the most basic level, Ren is a science aficionada. And she appears to have been born for it — her father majored in physics in college and now “works with a lot of math” (though Ren’s not entirely sure what he does), and her mother is an optometrist.
But Ren didn’t quite know how much she loved science until she got to middle school (Princeton Charter) and took her first class that introduced her to chemistry. As great teaching longs to do, the course ignited in Ren a love of science that she’s not likely to let go of.
“The teacher let us see a lot of stuff that was really cool,” she said.
She’s not all science, of course. She runs cross-country and plays on the PHS girls’ ice hockey team, mostly, she said, because they’re fun.
But science — particularly organic chemistry — is her primary love. She got her first real chemistry class as a sophomore and loved it so much that she started taking chemistry courses in the off-season. Last year she studied organic chemistry at a summer program at Princeton University.
This past spring, Ren qualified for the U.S. team of the 46th International Chemistry Olympiad, a two-week competition/college-level program that allows only 20 students from the country to represent Team USA. That’s 20 out of about 16,000 initial applicants, by the way. About 1,000 take the national test.
Ren and her 19 successful colleagues ventured to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in June to compete for the international finals in Vietnam in July. And while she was not one of the final eight to go to Vietnam, she did receive college- and graduate-level training (with an emphasis on her passion in organic chemistry) through a series of lectures, problem-solving exercises, lab work, and testing. And this was no walk in the proverbial park. Ren calls the experience “really intense,” relating word of daily four-hour lectures, four hours of labs, and three hours of class time.
“It was intense, it was tiring,” she said. And it was more so than she’d expected. But though the event wore her out a bit, she did manage to accomplish one main goal in going to Colorado Springs — she got to meet other people her own age who share her passion for chemistry. And while they didn’t have that much down time, Ren and her new friends did get to see Pike’s Peak on their last day.
Ren got back from Colorado on a Friday. By the end of that same weekend, she was off to the New Jersey Governor’s School in the Sciences, an equally intense three-week residential program where students are immersed in college-level research on the campus of Drew University. High school juniors are nominated by their schools in the fall, for the following summer.
Ren said she was in a group of about 80 and, again, was just as jazzed to meet other kids who share her interests as she was to learn about the science. Her stay at Drew centered on an ecology project in which Ren learned about the effects of global warming on plant life.
If nothing else, Ren defies the idea of the lonely scientist.
“There are a lot of social aspects about being in science,” she said. “There’s this image of you working alone in your lab for so long.”
But as she’s learned in programs like the Olympiad and the Governor’s School, two or three weeks is a really short amount of time to pull off so much work. “You have to work as a team.”
Working with people is what she loves most about what she does. From the hockey rink to the lab, Ren said she greatly enjoys putting her brain together with others and figuring out the answers to problems concerning the very building blocks of the universe. Her focus on the hard science itself is, right now anyway, zeroed in on synthesis.
What she wants to do with her already-impressive resume and her fast-growing body of knowledge, she is not quite sure yet. She does know she’s not likely to apply to Princeton, even though she would almost certainly qualify.
“I’ve recently been thinking about how I can apply what I know,” she said. Her thoughts are leading her toward medicine and the use of chemistry to treat diseases. She is considering pursuing a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering or following the pre-med path, but she’s not ready to make up her mind just yet.
For the next year, Ren said she will pursue more academic camps and activities while she still can. High schoolers, after all, have more opportunities for camps and programs like the Chemistry Olympiad than do college students. And yes, she may try again for the Olympiad, to see if she can qualify for the international finals this time.
And if Ren’s life sounds a little exhausting, well, occasionally it may be, but she’s not complaining.
“I don’t really get tired,” she said. “I really enjoy what I do.”
Princeton High School senior Stephanie Ren competed to participate in the National Chemistry Olympiad finals in Vietnam this summer. (Photo by Annie Gao.),
