Now that high school seniors are graduating, the class of 2023 is ready for college. The metro Atlanta valedictorians featured here have worked hard to achieve their success and have done so during a pandemic. They share their plans for the future. They also share their wisdom and advice as well as some of their favorite high school memories. (In some cases, responses were edited for length.)
Credit: Photo provided by Ajai Brinkley
Credit: Photo provided by Ajai Brinkley
AJC video: Voices of 2023 Atlanta valedictorians
Ajai Brinkley
School system: DeKalb County
High school: Southwest DeKalb High School
College: University of Georgia
Intended major: Marketing and Sports Management
Advice for freshmen: Always be unapologetically you. Throughout your years of high school, you will experience new stages of growth, meet new people, find your passions, have your highs and even your lows, but it’s always important to remain true to yourself. Have fun, but always keep your eyes on the prize: your future goals.
Helpful study habit: Make a schedule for the week and write down every assignment due, along with your obligations for the week. With all my clubs, work hours, and schoolwork, a schedule allowed me to balance it all.
Biggest challenges your generation will face: Peer pressure from the world. Remember that success doesn’t have a time on it. You don’t have to try to keep up with society’s norms. Just because someone else is ahead doesn’t mean that you’re behind. Everyone walks in their own path of life.
Credit: Photo courtesy Steven Reid
Credit: Photo courtesy Steven Reid
Steven Reid
School system: DeKalb County
High school: Lakeside High School
College: Georgia Tech
Intended major: Physics
Advice for freshmen: Don’t stop reading. A lot of kids stop reading by the time they get to high school. You don’t have to read any book in particular, just pick out a book you like.
Helpful study habit: Sleeping. One hour of work with a well-rested brain is worth three hours of work with a sleepy brain.
Biggest challenges your generation will face: We’ve made a lot of progress on the mental health front, but I think we have a long way to go with things like depression and addiction.
How optimistic are you about the future? I am pretty optimistic about the future. I hope we can send people to Mars soon. Or bring woolly mammoths back to life.
Credit: Photo provided by Heavyn Smith
Credit: Photo provided by Heavyn Smith
Heavyn Smith
School system: DeKalb County
High school: Columbia High School
College: Xavier University (Ohio)
Intended major: Psychology
Advice for freshmen: Be confident in yourself. It is important to stand in who you are and to not let anyone change you.
Helpful study habit: A reward system. When I get a study question right, I will reward myself by eating a piece of candy or taking a small break.
Favorite memory from high school: The teacher versus student basketball game. It was very fun and interesting to watch the two teams go against each other.
Biggest challenges your generation will face: Empathy. Oftentimes, problems arise when both parties are not understanding of one another.
How optimistic are you about the future? I am very optimistic for my future. I love experiencing new things and my future is full of the unknown. I look forward to the opportunities and mysteries my future holds.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Kate Carpenter
School system: Fulton County
High school: Roswell High School
College: MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Intended major: Nuclear Engineering
Helpful study habit: Sometimes I feel like the human version of Adderall, but the cheap kind that wears off as soon as school ends. Thus, I work nonstop from the moment I step on campus in the morning, consistently bringing no work home. For days when I have to study, I’ve found structured cramming to be the most logical option. It’s taboo but effective for low-stakes tests.
Favorite memory from high school: My favorite part of high school was not studying, contrary to public opinion. Rather, it was the period after AP exams when we spent weeks playing games, building card pyramids, painting ceiling tiles, flipping through every published yearbook, and designing break-out rooms.
Biggest challenges your generation will face: Everything’s going to hit the fan during my lifetime. However, I wouldn’t have it any other way because Gen Z is perhaps the only generation equipped to handle the multidimensional issues plaguing Earth. Increasingly interconnected, we consistently rely on global networks of problem-solving, crowdsourcing solutions to problems that don’t even have names yet. We take advantage of technological developments, pioneering careers and spurring innovations in the face of overwhelming skepticism. Ergo, the biggest challenge my generation will face is not climate change or the breakdown of international relations. Rather, our Everest will be transitioning our boundless digital platform into seamless connections in the face-to-face world.
How optimistic are you about the future? For my future and the future of the class of 2023, I am increasingly optimistic. We represent the best of Atlanta, and I can’t wait to get started. Look out for us because we will be making waves.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Hannah Jiang
School system: Fulton County
High school: Johns Creek High School
College: Duke University
Intended major: Economics
Helpful study habit: Keep a calendar or agenda to remember what you have to do. Keep your phone away from your studying area. Don’t forget to take breaks and go out with friends to destress. Being a good student and having normal human emotions and needs are not mutually exclusive.
Favorite memory from high school: Eating lunch with my friends at the same lunch table everyday. I won’t remember what we talked about every day, but I’ll always remember looking forward to it every day.
Biggest challenges your generation will face: Addressing climate change and sustainable energy options and confronting inequalities in wealth, gender, race. The struggles to tackle these challenges underscore the political, social and economic divisions that feed into the longevity of these issues. Although society has made leaps and bounds of progress, many challenges remain unconquered. They will remain unconquered unless faced on a more united front.
How optimistic are you about the future? I feel optimistic when I look at the countless small projects being done by my peers and older generations for a good cause – collecting money and supplies for the homeless, conducting research on a rare disease that doesn’t receive enough attention, or building infrastructure projects in impoverished areas. Seeing passionate people utilizing their skills to help others motivates me to do the same and restores my hope for the future. It isn’t exactly a glass-half-full or half-empty question. An optimist can still be cynical and wary while maintaining hope for a positive future.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Jennifer Kang
School system: Fulton County
High school: Cambridge High School
College: University of Florida
Intended major: Health Science
Helpful study habit: Take breaks in between studying. I’ve learned that sitting at a desk for hours on end doesn’t realistically work. Also, making a list of everything I need to get done and being able to physically cross it off when I complete it tends to motivate me to keep going.
Favorite memory from high school: Favorite memories were created simply from sitting at the lunch table and laughing for the entire hour or going to the student center and playing board/card games during a free period.
Biggest challenges your generation will face: Division. More time is spent debating extremes than working toward a beneficial middle ground. The unwillingness to learn, listen, and change that has lately been evident will result in a failure to move toward compromise and an improved future.
How optimistic are you about the future? I am optimistic that my generation is motivated to advance toward a successful future. Many of us have been able to begin our lives with greater opportunities than would have been available in the past. In addition, we are becoming more and more interconnected with the rest of the world. Through this expanded social and cultural awareness, I believe that we have a greater capacity to do good in the world.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Mallika Kulkarni
School system: Fulton County
High school: Chattahoochee High School
College: University of Pennsylvania
Intended major: Computer Science and possibly Economics
Advice for freshmen: Keeping a balanced lifestyle between academics and social life is essential in high school. It is easy to keep the two worlds completely separate, but most students do not realize that they can merge them. From volunteering with friends to playing on sports teams, there are many ways to integrate your “fun” time and working.
Favorite memory from high school: My senior night on the Varsity tennis team. Seeing my past four years of matches and bus rides with the same people culminate in one night was incredibly rewarding. I saw so many important people in my life in the same place, my closest friends from school who came to support me, the four other seniors on the team who have seen me grow over the past four years, and my parents, who never stopped supporting me.
Biggest challenges your generation will face: Our generation, throughout our childhood, has been influenced by social media. Our futures will be integrated with technology, and I believe that our biggest challenge will be learning how to adapt to these constant changes while staying focused on our career goals.
How optimistic are you about the future? From what I have seen, regardless of any obstacles we face, I know that we will make the next few years of our lives some of the best. The pandemic and online learning certainly slowed our education, but students have come back even more motivated and willing to stand up for themselves in an academic setting. Every day in the hallways, I see students overcome so many unprecedented challenges. If our generation can tackle this, I believe that we can persevere through anything.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Samad Ahmed
School system: Gwinnett County
High school: Berkmar High School
College: Georgia Tech
Intended major: Computer Science
Advice for freshmen: Try to develop a healthy mentality about yourself and try to push yourself out of your comfort zone, as little or as big as you like. Try to have experiences you can use for self-reflection later on and you’ll grow as a person because of it.
Helpful study habit: Try to set an environment you only use to study in, and eliminate any possible distractions, and eventually the brain will know that it’s time to study. It’s also helpful not to come in with extra “baggage” or outside thoughts that could distract you, so anything you do to clear your mind beforehand is useful.
How optimistic are you about the future? Although I am overall optimistic about the future, realistically looking there is still much to not look forward to as there are things to look forward to. All one person can do is control their own actions, and it will take the whole world to control their actions to try and steer towards one where we have a better future, but as time passes, it feels as though we are both splitting apart and coming together, so we can only guess at what will happen.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Mariabelle Azemar
School system: Gwinnett County
High school: Central Gwinnett High School
College: MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Intended major: Mechanical Engineering — concentrating in Civil/Environmental Engineering and Urban Planning
Advice for freshmen: Take school seriously but also explore your interests. But if you are a freshman who is ambitious about getting into a good school — please understand this: The reality is, you may not get into a “prestigious” university. This gets more and more real every year. This is why it is important to 1) go through high school for yourself — explore your interests and have fun while also maintaining your studies and 2) realize that whatever college you go to does not define you — stop putting so much emphasis into “where” you end up and more emphasis into what you want to do at wherever you end up and beyond.
Helpful study habit: Start reviewing the content you are least familiar/comfortable with too. It’s kind of like, if you play an instrument, only practicing the parts of a piece you’re already really good at because it is easy for you — never getting better at the harder parts. And it goes without saying: STOP CRAMMING. It will make you less stressed.
Biggest challenges your generation will face: There really are too many problems to even begin listing: prejudice, economic security, mental health treatment, environmental issues, etc., etc. One challenge we definitely face is trying to create wide-reaching social change. And a reason that I’ve noticed why this is an issue is because of people’s lack of awareness and understanding of others. As my generation tries to make positive social strides, a lot of these efforts can be thwarted by this issue. Whenever we meet anyone that has a different opinion than us, it leads to shunning or harassment. People tend to forget that we all grew up differently: in different environments, with different experiences, learning different lessons, and so on. However, we assume everyone should see the world the way we see it — causing many of us to have narrow-minded views and perceptions. If we want to successfully create social change, we not only have to realize this as fact, but be willing to have conversations with people we don’t agree with. It takes involving everyone to create change.
How optimistic are you about the future? I struggle with this question. On the one hand, I see all of the progress, socially, technologically, etc., that we are making every year and even every day. Heck, I’m going to a university where some of the biggest strides in technology for the betterment of society occur. It’s really inspiring to see how far we can get with our knowledge to end up changing our world’s biggest issues for the better. However, even with all of this hope for the future, we see time and time again outspoken groups using their power to oppress and silence everyone else. Even though we see so much push for social change or technological change, we have many people who use their power to preemptively shut down progress. I really do hope that we are able to make much more progress in the future, but my optimism for such a great outcome sometimes falters.
