These Twins Really Are One of a Kind

About the only thing that separates identical twins Joel and Noel Mendoza these days are a few hundredths of a point on their GPAs.

The 17-year-old Pacoima residents look so identical even their longtime English teacher has trouble telling them apart. At San Fernando High School, they have followed almost identical paths, taking the same classes and playing tennis and working on the school newspaper together.

After they graduate next week, all that will change. Although they will both be studying for degrees in aerospace engineering, they will do so at different colleges--Joel at Notre Dame and Noel at MIT.

The pair are typically matter of fact about their imminent separation--they will both be leaving for college in the first week of July to attend summer programs. “Since we’ve been together nearly 18 years, nothing much will change,” said Noel. “We just won’t talk as much.”

The Mendozas’ resemblance is uncanny. “I still do have trouble telling them apart,” said Dorothy Madson, their English teacher since their junior year. “I have to seat them in alphabetical order according to their first names.”

While Joel is a little more talkative, they are both shy and reserved. “They can just sit there and not say a word,” said Jerry Kazdoy, adviser to the school’s newspaper where the twins worked as reporters this year.

At elementary school and junior high, they were put in separate classes. But at San Fernando High, they have been together for every class except one--Noel took French and his brother Spanish. Along the way, they took five Advanced Placement classes.

The results have only differed by a fraction: Noel is graduating third in his class with a 4.16 GPA (weighted to include extra points for AP classes) while Joel is graduating eighth with a weighted 4.0.

The twins, who turn 18 in August, admit that they compete with each other but say the rivalry has only helped them at school. “Overall, it’s beneficial,” Joel said. “It makes us work hard to get better grades.”

Outside school, they have followed the same routine--studying and working for The Times on Friday afternoons, packaging sections for the Sunday edition. They credit their parents with keeping them so focused amid the distractions facing teen-agers in Los Angeles. “They make sure we don’t hang around with the wrong crowds,” Joel explained. “They don’t want us to end up hanging around people on the street, working for minimum wage.”

The brothers, who hope to parlay their study of aerospace engineering into careers at NASA, said they didn’t set out to go to different colleges. They just made their choices and found that only USC appeared on each of their lists. In choosing Notre Dame and MIT, they were both attracted by the idea of venturing into unknown territory. “It’s a new environment,” Noel said of MIT. “I wanted to experience something different.”