By Emmy Ribero
River Hill’s class of 2021 has an impressive range of college acceptances. A large percentage of seniors were admitted to many competitive schools, making all their hard work in high school pay off. There are five seniors this year that were admitted into ivy league schools: Andrew Zhao, Isabelle Wu, Zach Lee, Acacia Listou, and Sonia Goyal. College application decisions this year were particularly competitive, making these acceptances very impressive. Sonia was admitted to UPenn and the others all got into Cornell. These students worked very hard both in and out of the classroom for their acceptances. Their time in high school was used very effectively, which allowed them to become ivy bound.
Andrew Zhao:
Andrew Zhao spent most of his time at River Hill exploring his interest in STEM classes, both in class and with extracurriculars. After getting graduation requirements out of the way in his freshman year, he geared his entire schedule to advanced STEM classes such as AP Chemistry, AP Calculus, AP Physics, etc. “I honestly can’t say I’d recommend going overboard with those AP classes because it’s really not for everyone.” Andrew comments. The workload of the rigorous STEM classes can really only be handled by those who respond well to high levels of stress.
Outside of the classroom, he spent a lot of time with the Science Olympiad. He currently is president of the club and they have become the best team in the region. “Coming into freshman year, we were consistently around the top 5 in the state, but we hadn’t actually won in nearly a decade. Eventually, as I started taking on greater leadership roles in the club, we’ve slowly but surely gone from ~5th place in MD to 1st in the region.” Under prior leadership, the club was focused on the upperclassmen, as they were the ones who had taken the harder classes and were able to perform better at competitions. This caused them to be worried about how underclassmen would take over the club when the seniors leave. When he took leadership, he shifted the focus and now they compete side by side and the results have been great and the future for the River Hill Science Olympiad looks bright.
In addition to all the time devoted to Science Olympiad, he was an active member of SGA, NHS, an officer for French Honors Society and was first violinist at the Maryland Youth Symphony Orchestra. It was important to maintain a sense of well-roundedness to his application. “I think the main thing is really to tell a story with your application.” Andrew adds while talking about all that he participated in during high school. He wanted to demonstrate all of his interests with his extracurriculars for the college admissions. Time management was a hard task for him, with all of his extracurriculars and rigorous courses, it would be tough at times to organize it all. “To be honest, all people really ever see is the impeccable work ethic and the straight As and sky high SAT scores. It’s not necessarily true for everyone and the stereotype breaks down when you dig more into it. I understand that I probably look like some perfect student who was bound to go to any ivy league school from an outsider’s perspective, but it is really difficult to try and juggle everything at once. It’s a balancing act of sorts.”
Outside of school, he had volunteered at a library over the summer and would be involved with helping kids in the summer reading program that the library would offer. He also got an internship the summer of his sophomore year. “My job was to analyze and validate data collected by artificial intelligence for the purpose of conditioning and calibration. So, I worked with a lot of machine learning algorithms.” He believes that the internship and volunteering were a big factor in what boosted his application.
He fell in love with Cornell because of a visit to the campus he took in the summer of his junior year. “The campus is absolutely gorgeous and it’s in a small town, far away from any big cities. Also, the culture there is collaborative and quire stressful and I feel like I’d thrive in that kind of environment.” He also loves that Cornell has the #1 engineering program out of all the other ivies.
Isabelle Wu:
Isabelle Wu had a pretty rigorous schedule at River Hill, totaling up to 13 AP classes taken over the four years with a multitude of honors classes as well. “That being said, it is definitely more important to get good grades in your classes, maintain a high GPA, and be able to understand course material as opposed to trying to cram as many AP classes in your schedule as possible” She says. It is also important to not overwork yourself and focus one doing as much as you can handle.
Isabelle also boosted her application with various extracurricular activities she participated in. She is involved in NHS, National Honors Society for Dance Arts, French National Honors society, with an internship outside of school. She also focuses a lot of time with body positivity and awareness. At River Hill, she started a club devoted to this subject. They were able to accomplish a lot towards spreading awareness about body positivity and wellness. She started a nonprofit organization for this cause as well. “For the nonprofits, one was one that I joined and became the director of after the former director graduated. It worked to raise awareness about eating disorders, especially in students and teenagers in general. I’d say a nonprofit is a great way to pursue something that you’re passionate about in a way that has a pretty direct impact.” She is a part of a few nonprofits devoted to this cause because she feels passionate about raising awareness for body positivity.
Outside of school, she spends a lot of time at ballet. Her rehearsals average out to about five hours a day, daily. She has won various awards and competitions with this as well, some awards have led to scholarships. She spent a lot of her time here because she wanted to manage her time doing the thing she loves to do. “I tried to accomplish things that were meaningful to me, instead of sacrificing quality for quantity.”
With all of the APs, Isabelle spent a lot of time studying. “For studying, I think that it’s very important to understand the content you learn in class as opposed to just learning the bare minimum to do well on an exam. The only way to be fully and truly prepared for any test is to make sure you are following the material that the teacher is covering, and this way you won’t have to doubt whether you’ll know what’s on the exam or not.” She’d make sure she would not only know what she needed to get the A, but the subject matter as a whole to ensure that she would succeed in that class. Additionally, she “would always stay after school to meet with the teacher so they could help [her] understand”. She would use all resources accessible to her to help understand difficult concepts. Additionally, the last advice she offers is, “it’s much easier to study as you go along with the course, as opposed to only when you know you have a test coming up. First of all, in many rigorous classes, there’s always a test coming up. Secondly, it’s much more manageable this way and helps prevent all the course content from getting too overwhelming.”
Cornell is one of her top choices but she is not committed. “I think the most appealing thing about Cornell for me personally is the education it offers, which is obviously a very high quality one. It’s a private school and the class sizes are much smaller, so I’m sure there is more personal interaction between peers as well as between student and professor.” She is not entirely committed to Cornell because she has always wanted to go to a big city campus and Cornell, although a beautiful campus, is isolated. She believes that all factors should be taken into account when deciding whether to go to a college. “I want to say that ivy league schools are obviously amazing and unparalleled in many ways but it really does depend on the individual and what they are looking to get out of their college experience. I don’t think anyone should feel pressured to go to an ivy league school just because it’s an ivy league school. There’s a lot of other important factors that should be considered.”
Zach Lee:
Zach Lee made the most of his time at River Hill, being a popular member of the breakdance club (notorious for his back flip) and being on varsity tennis since freshman year. He also has taken roughly 13 AP classes and honors and GT everywhere else he could. He had a STEM focus but also explored art classes with his time on the photo track, also AP and GTs.
Outside of the classroom, his main extracurriculars were SGA and breakdance. He had a very active leadership career in various ways in school, which undoubtedly looked very good on his resume and for college applications. He was voted class president in his sophomore year and continued this role throughout the rest of his high school career. Similarly, he became Co-president of the breakdance club at the end of his sophomore year and held this position since. He also co-founded the widely popular RHHS Magic club. He was not only active in clubs during high school, but was involved in sports as well. He has played for the varsity tennis team since freshman year in both doubles and singles. He was able to take home the third place regional trophy for River Hill.
Separate from school, Zach had a very busy summer as well. He would spend most of his time shadowing a dermatologist, another great opportunity for the resume. Along with this, he would have tennis lessons and would play for other teams such as the Junior Team Tennis USTA Team. And when he could find a moment to spare, he would tutor middle schoolers in math.
Time management was crucial for him, as he had to balance rigorous classes with all of his extracurricular activities. “I used my planner religiously and google calendar too. Being head officer of clubs was nice since I had some control over meeting times. For school work, there was some free time to work in class some free time to work in class, so I always tried to make the most of it instead of goofing off.” His time in school was always made the most of for doing work. It was hard to balance all the assignments, so he would use every spare minute to take care of it while he was at school. “My goal was to have the least amount of homework before school ended. Sometimes I would have none. Myself-policy was if I had free time, I would spend it on any future assignments.” He had a good mindset towards his assignments, to get it all done by the end of day. This worked in his favor and he maximized his time for other activities because of it.
His study habits reflected this mindset because he tried to avoid cramming as much as possible. “I would always give myself at least two days to study.” This allowed for him to prepare the best he could for every quiz or assessment. “Making quizlets or study guides for myself and my classmates helped me retain information and make helpful resources.” Many people who took APs know Zach has the best quizlets for what seems like every AP class at River Hill. His quizlets were passed around to everyone and were very helpful study materials for both Zach and everyone in the class. He is passing them to underclassmen as well (his username is zlee1401). He is “glad [he] could help” and it “always makes [him] happy to hear that they were used!”
He is not yet committed to Cornell and is currently deciding between there and Georgetown University. He loves both of the schools but his favorite thing about Cornell is “that it’s very diverse and the beautiful campus and there are many bright intellectual minds there. Another plus is that the food they give is the best. They have fresh ice cream from the agricultural school!” There are pros and cons to both of the great schools he’s deciding between and his future will be bright at either one.