By Johana Lastor
Dev Patel
As the Class of 2017 is counting down their final days as high school students, the question on who is Valedictorian in their class initiates. Meet Dev Patel, who ranks number one in the Senior class this year.
When I had the opportunity to interview Dev, he mentions that being Valedictorian is an “a surreal feeling.”
Throughout his four years of high school, he survived by “managing multiple extracurriculars and AP classes” and he is proud that it “has finally paid off.” However, he states that “stats are not everything, the growth and the amount of things I have learned on this journey have really shaped who I am.” The motivation behind his effort in his rigorous work? It’s not the title of being number one, but for himself.
Throughout his high school career, Dev mentions his biggest accomplishment has to be his growth, “becoming who I am today, someone that I am proud to be”. Furthermore, he states that he has accomplished becoming a Questbridge finalist, first team all-county for tennis, honorary youth, scholar athlete, and MVP of the tennis team throughout his high school career.
As Dev closes one chapter in his life, he hopes that in the future he will be able to “engineer artificial organs and develop new gene therapy techniques to help people live a better life by eliminating the physical pain and distress.” With his future achievements, he hopes that by then he will be recognized through his “breakthroughs in biomedical engineering” by winning the “Nobel Prize in Medicine and Biology”.
Narrowing down his college acceptances, Dev will be attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute due to their “strong undergraduate research focus and their connections with pioneer companies that have access to the latest technologies for innovation.” There, he will be majoring in biomedical engineering. His motivation for his major is, “growing up and having a dad who has polio meant that he couldn’t do what other fathers could.”
Witnessing the struggles that his father encountered allowed Dev to grow an interest in eliminating “the limitations set by the body so that everyone can have equity in living their lives.” He mentions that his major “combines engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for health care purposes.”
Dev mentions that after his high school career, he hopes to travel internationally and become “immersed in all the different cultures that exist”. As well as trying new things like “new ethnic foods, traditional dances, and live music.”
Fast forward in a decade, he envisions himself “working for a state of the art research lab conducting clinical experiments to find a cure for cancer and cystic fibrosis and many other diseases that impair quality of life for many.”
He is also hoping to be “working on human cloning and artificial organs to treat transplant patients who reject foreign organs.”
In essence, as Dev Patel closes his high school chapter in his life, he prepares to initiate a new one afterward that is far more arduous than what he has accomplished now. The future waits for the Valedictorian of the Class of 2017 and we cannot wait to see what he accomplishes!
