Top Grads Aim for Top Schools : Lofty Goals Set as Brightest Select Colleges

Charles Smithers, valedictorian of San Clemente High School, wants to be a medical missionary and is heading for UC Irvine. Maryela Martinez, top student at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, is going to Harvard. And Dana Kalev, one of this afternoon’s commencement speakers at Huntington Beach High School, is heading back to Jerusalem to join the Israeli Army.

With career plans ranging from international law to astrophysics, top graduates of Orange County public high schools have amassed stratospheric grade point averages and are headed for some of the best universities and colleges in California and the nation.

In a survey of valedictorians and commencement speakers at 56 public high schools, campuses of the University of California led the list of college destinations. (The survey did not include private and parochial high schools or continuation high schools.)

Students to Scatter

Of the 109 top graduates included in the survey, 18 chose UCLA; 17 are going to UC Irvine; 12 to UC Berkeley, 11 are enrolling at Stanford and 6 at Harvard. MIT, Georgetown and Yale are also on the list, as well as local colleges such as Cal State Fullerton, Cypress College and Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

“Orange County does very well in terms of sending us high-caliber students and in having their fair share of students gaining admission,” said Sara Salvide, a senior admissions officer for Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

“We find that Orange County students are becoming more aware of educational opportunities,” said James Dunning, director of admissions at UC Irvine, adding: “In the last five years, UC Irvine has attracted more students from farther away, while some of the best students in the county are going to colleges outside of the area.”

Paul Konovalov, the senior with the highest grade point average at Huntington Beach High School, for instance, is going to Georgetown University in Washington. Part of the attraction, he said, is that Washington “is the center of everything.” He said he picked Georgetown instead of Stanford because “it appears the foreign-service program is stronger.”

A Busy Career

Jane Deng, one of six students to earn all A’s at University High in Irvine, turned down Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley and UCLA to pursue a joint seven-year undergraduate and medical school program at Northwestern University. An accomplished pianist, Deng said the high point of her high school career occurred last year when she was one of half a dozen young high school musicians to receive the Young Artist Award of California. Asked what she did in her spare time, Deng admitted to being a “really big movie freak.”

Deron Pease, valedictorian at Fullerton High, won first prize in the Orange County Science and Engineering Fair this year. He is going to attend UC Santa Cruz to study astrophysics. Why Santa Cruz? “Because it has one of the top astrophysics departments on the West Coast and some of the leading thinkers are there.”

“I have always been fascinated with space, the endlessness of it all,” Pease said. “While astronomy is concerned with planets and stars, astrophysics is more about the workings of the system as a whole and involves the search for extraterrestrial life.”

Martinez, one of the two valedictorians at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, came from Cuba when she was 9 years old. Chosen to be the only student member of the 11-member state Board of Education last year, she plans to study politics and government at Harvard and hopes to go on to law school.

Smithers, who wants to be a doctor and then a medical missionary, picked UCI because it is close to home and he could commute, and because it “has a good biology department and a good medical school.”

In addition, he explained that his father was in the Marines and his mother works for IBM, and the family over the years has moved from Virginia to West Virginia to Pennsylvania to Michigan before coming to Orange County. Now he would like to stay a while. “I’ve lived lots of places and this is my favorite.”

Over Christmas, Smithers and members of the San Clemente Presbyterian Church went to Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Tex., and helped repair an orphanage.

At Buena Park High School, the top three students are best friends, said Heena Contractor. She and Lieu Ho are co-valedictorians and her boyfriend, Andrew Yang, follows them with the next-highest grade-point average. She will attend UCI in the fall, while Ho and Yang will be going to UCLA.

Contractor, who said that her parents moved to the United States from India when she was 9 months old, added: “I am going to major in the biological sciences and hope to someday be a pediatrician.” She said she would miss Buena Park High School because “the teachers care for you not only as students, but as people.”

“There is a certain closeness you feel,” she said. “It is going to be scary to go out there and start over.”

Not everyone of this elite group of graduates is going to college immediately. Dana Kalev of Huntington Beach High School, who came to Southern California from Jerusalem when she was 6 years old, said she will return to Israel where she will serve two years in the army. “I really want to go back there. It’s where I want to start my life.”

Except for her parents, all of Kalev’s relatives--including her sister--live in Israel, she said. She plans to go to college in Israel after completing her army hitch. The army will be “a nice break because I can decide what I’d like to do.”

WHERE THE TOP ORANGE COUNTY STUDENTS ARE GOING Orange County public high school valedictorians and commencement speakers chose to attend the following schools this fall:

UCLA: 18

UC Irvine: 17

UC Berkeley: 12

Stanford: 11

Harvard: 7

MIT: 4

UC San Diego: 3

USC, Cypress College, Pomona College, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Smith, Northwestern--2

Loyola Marymount, Cal State Fullerton, Fullerton College, San Diego State, UC Santa Cruz, Orange Coast College, Georgetown, University of Vienna, Arizona State, U.S. Naval Academy, University of Wisconsin, U.S. Air Force Academy, Kansas City College, Southern Methodist, Boston University, Biola College, UC Riverside, Fashion Institute--1 each.

GRADUATIONS

See Clipboard, Life, Page 2.