WORCESTER — With the school year concluding, the Telegram & Gazette sat down to speak with the top students in the Class of 2025. Find out more about the valedictorians from the Class of 2025 at Worcester high schools below.
Burncoat High - Kasie Vuong
Kasie Vuong first fell in love with learning when she was an elementary student at Rice Square Elementary School in Worcester, where the teachers kept her engaged with different ways to teach students how to learn.
"I remember my first day of kindergarten and being scared because there were so many new people to meet," Vuong said. "But at my school I felt like the teachers did a great job making you want to learn, doing things like playing games, or singing and it was really fun."
Vuong, who is headed to Northeastern University in Boston to study health science with the goal of becoming a pediatrician, said that she has always been extremely competitive in not only her academics but also in everything.
"Once you first get straight As, you really don't want to slack off and do any less than that," Vuong said. "I want to win in everything."
A graduate of Burncoat High, which is a magnet school for the performing arts in the city, Vuong plays the violin and said that has served as a respite when she has gotten burnt out from studying.
"Burncoat has a lot of opportunities as an art school. Playing with the Burncoat Symphony Orchestra, music for me always has helped me relax and it gives me something else other than studying to work on, to practice and I can constantly improve, so it always gives me a goal to work on," Vuong said.
Claremont Academy - Amrit Boyal
Whenever she had a question about a particular challenging problem or just a general question about navigating her high school career, Amrit Boyal said she turned to her math teacher, Adelina Zaimi, for guidance.
"I met her freshman year and all throughout the four years, we met outside school and go out for lunches and I feel like she really helped he navigate high school. If I had a problem at home and I couldn't talk to my parents, I'd talk to her," Boyal said. "I was just in her room all the time and she helped me grow as a person."
Claremont Academy, which is a small school in Worcester that focuses on college preparatory classes for students, offered the kind of small-scale, student-to-teacher relationship that allowed Boyal to thrive and become the top of her class. A native of India who moved to the United States as a child, Boyal said that Claremont offered a tight-knit community that supported her and other students throughout her time at the school.
"Since Claremont is so small, everyone knows each other and we really emphasize the importance of 'Ubuntu' which means 'I am because we are' and since it is such a small school everybody knows each other and helps each other when they are down," Boyal said.
Boyal is headed to Boston College to study applied psychology on a pre-law track, with aims of graduating through Boston College's 3+3 program, which will grant her a law degree after six years of studying, where she will then pursue criminal law.
Doherty Memorial High - Dea Kamberi
When Dea Kamberi enters Harvard this fall, she is looking to show that students from Worcester Public Schools are primed to perform at the highest advanced learning institutions on the planet.
"I think there is a stigma associated with public schools about not being really preparatory, almost limiting in your options in the future, and that is completely inaccurate," Kamberi said. "We've seen students thrive and go on to amazing institutions, and I think being in Worcester, a city that some people may look down upon, it is really empowering to know that the Worcester school system is so fruitful."
Kamberi, who will be studying government on a pre-law track at Harvard, said that from an early age she fell in love with everything about going to school. Kamberi, who became the first Worcester resident to be named the Massachusetts Distinguished Young Woman earlier this year , said that enthusiasm drove her to success.
"I was very social growing up, I would talk to everyone and when my teachers wanted me to shut up, they'd put me next to the boys and I'd still talk to them. I always wanted to take advantage of everything in school, and I think that drove my curiosity," Kamberi said.
Kamberi said in high school she fell in love with English and discussing the meanings of different texts, and formed a close relationship with one of her teachers, Michael Wood.
"I remember being so stressed about AP English, particularly having to write a timed essay as I really liked to take my time with my writing," Kamberi said. "He would be so supportive, spending his free period sitting down with me and going over my essays. I've taken away so many free hours of his, but he is a teacher that seriously takes the time to help their students. I would always say that I was sorry to bother him, and he'd reply that I wasn't bothering him, he loved to do this."
North High - Alexandra Lech
As a student, Alexandra Lech looked up to her brother, David Lech, who now works as a chemical engineer. She planned on studying chemical engineering in college, but one thing was holding her back.
"I didn't want to live in the middle of nowhere," she said with a smile. "He lives in rural Wyoming and has to drive an hour to work each way."
Instead, Lech will study electrical engineering at Boston University this fall. While a student at North High, she said a memorable moment for her came when she had to petition the school before her junior year to allow her to take more advanced placement courses.
"I wanted to take five AP classes and my school was pretty strict about only letting me take three, and they told me it was too much and I would fail out of them. I wrote a letter and had a whole meeting with the principal and they let me take them, and I got passing scores on all the tests," Lech said. "The fact that they told me I could not do it made me try harder, and I proved to myself I could do more."
South High Community School - Alina Liu
When Alina Liu was a young student, she found learning exciting but also felt like what she was forced to focus on in school didn't always satisfy her curiosity.
"I really liked learning, it was my favorite thing and I loved generally observing what was around me," Liu said. "I hated school itself though. It felt like a slog, like busywork where you were not really learning. As I got older that did change, I loved my calculus class this year, it was so fast-paced and it was great to have a teacher that was so passionate about what they were teaching."
Liu, who will be attending Harvard in the fall to study statistics, said that a memorable moment for her came during her freshman year when she and a group of friends had to organize an orchestral chamber band to play in a holiday concert.
"We got the opportunity as a whole to play at a celebration night around Christmas, so myself and some friends formed a little group of four. We didn't have too much experience playing together, but I think it really taught me how to work with others, how to schedule things and I think that really helped me throughout high school," Liu said.
University Park Campus School - Melina Fana Aquino
After Melina Fana Aquino graduates from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she will be studying electrical computer engineering, she dreams of having her own business that will be focused on empowering female students in STEM fields.
"STEM is primarily a male-dominated field and so I want all the girls in the world, not just in Worcester, I want this to be a global thing, an inspiration for other women that don't necessarily see themselves in STEM, that they can do it," Fana Aquino said. "In my own experience I didn't see that many women in tech classes, mainly because they said it was a 'manly' thing, and I think that is a stereotype that it is only for men."
Fana Aquino said that from an early age she understood the importance of education, and that she needed to achieve in school in order to be successful. Over the six years she spent at University Park Campus School, a school that focuses on preparing students from Worcester for college, in partnership with Clark University, she said that the close-knit community at the school helped her thrive.
"Being with the same cohort the same time, it helped me get to know myself even better. The school is seventh grade through twelfth, and being with that group the entire time, I got to know everybody so personally that I would learn so much from them and think how I can do something better," Fana Aquino said.
Worcester Technical High School - Funbi Fatoke
Fatoke was a sophomore in high school when she first learned what the term "valedictorian" meant.
"I was in art class and our teacher asked us to write goals for our high school experience, and I said I wanted to be ranked first in my class, and my teacher said I wanted to be the valedictorian, and I was like, what is that?" Fatoke said. "That really got me hooked and I was actually not ranked first until recently. I took a lot of AP courses my senior year."
Fatoke said she grew up in Nigeria before moving to Massachusetts when she was in fifth grade. She described the school programming in Nigeria as very rigorous and stressful, and by comparison she thought her schooling in Worcester was enjoyable.
"I remember my first day of school in America, and I found the material to be surprisingly easy and fun, so I started to help my peers with it when they had questions and that made things a lot more fun for me," Fatoke said. "In Nigeria school was very hard, I was used to very rigorous teaching."
Fatoke is headed to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she will study biology on a pre-med track with dreams of being an anesthesiologist. Among her family, she said the expectation is for her to go on and get a medical degree.
"I've always been interested in health care, and honestly in a Nigerian household it is always like, doctor, doctor, doctor and so I've been researching it for a while, plus I really like helping people," Fatoke said. "At Worcester Tech I was in the Allied Health program and that hooked me on it because I learned about so many things I could be doing in the health field."
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Meet the Worcester Class of 2025 valedictorians
