Marin McCormack
Arlington Tech
In the fall of her sophomore year, Marin McCormack was racing down the field during a Virginia Union ECNL soccer game when she got caught between two players and heard a “pop” in her left knee. Surgery for a torn ACL and months of rehab meant she was out for the season. It was a blow for the competitive athlete who also played lacrosse and golf and ran track.
Moral support from friends got her through what she calls “a dark period in my life.” Around the same time, McCormack met Susan Thompson-Gaines, a self-proclaimed “kindness activist,” and began helping with various grassroots projects in the community, from wrapping holiday gifts for kids to stocking a “little free pantry” with food donations.
Inspired by the impact of those simple acts, McCormack started a Kindness Club at Arlington Tech, where she was taking computer science classes. Since then, the club’s student members have written cards to veterans, left uplifting messages on bathroom mirrors at school, and painted rocks with pick-me-up phrases that students can take from the school’s rock garden and keep.
“A lot of people have been mentally struggling,” observes the 18-year-old. “When someone feels happy from your kindness, they’re more likely to spread kindness to others.”
She’s doing her part. “Marin is a shining example of what it means to be a good human,” says Thompson-Gaines.
One year after her injury, McCormack was fully recovered and back in action. As a member of the track team at Yorktown High School (Arlington Tech doesn’t have a sports program, so she competed for her home school), she set a record for the 400-meter and helped the 800-meter relay team qualify for state competition.
This fall, she heads to the University of Virginia, her mother’s and sister’s alma mater, where she was recruited to play soccer and plans to study data science or statistics. She says being sidelined yielded some valuable perspective. “If I’m having a hard day at practice and I’m stressed about school, I just remind myself about the times I wasn’t able to play, and how not fun that was.” –Lisa Lednicer
Vivian Monaco
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Vivian Monaco was a freshman at TJ when she helped build a CubeSat—a small satellite that was sent to the International Space Station to test the connectivity of satellites in space. That project sparked her interest in aerospace engineering, which she now plans to study at Virginia Tech this fall while participating in Air Force ROTC.
“We think we know a lot [about space], but we don’t even know what we don’t know,” she says. “We’re making so many advances. I want to be part of that.”
Monaco served as president of the TJ Nanosatellite Program, a club for students with an interest in space, and launched a program with nearby middle schools that engages students in research projects using high-altitude balloons. She also taught coding to 5-7-year-olds through the STEM franchise Code Ninjas.
Beyond academics, the Arlington teen played varsity field hockey and softball, captaining TJ’s softball team and setting three school records. She relishes the strategy aspect of the game—particularly the mental calculations that factor into stealing bases.
Her experience attending one of the nation’s top-ranked high schools wasn’t all smooth sailing. Monaco, who is biracial, says she has been called the n-word and has occasionally overheard disparaging comments about TJ’s admissions standards, which the Fairfax County School Board voted to alter in 2020—in part to ensure more diversity at the school. A straight-A student, she was among those admitted after the new rules took effect.
Monaco’s family has confronted racism before: In 1957, her grandmother was turned away from Washington-Liberty High School (then Washington-Lee and still segregated) when she tried to register for classes. Monaco says the KKK burned a cross on the family’s front lawn in retaliation.
“Ever since I was born it’s been ingrained in me—the values of treating people fairly and not judging them based on their race or sexuality,” she says. “I think I’m particularly lucky.” –Lisa Lednicer
Preston Lieu
Meridian High School
Preston Lieu is a serial entrepreneur and problem solver. In the summer of 2022 he launched Newsian, an outreach effort that emailed political news summaries to elderly Korean Americans and Chinese Americans in their native languages to encourage them to go out and vote.
He ran the news aggregate for a year, then gave up because the emails weren’t being opened and he was struggling to find editors and translators. Unfazed, he started another enterprise, Youthward, which bills itself as a matchmaking service connecting teens with youth-led passion projects worldwide. He built out that organization during his sophomore year while participating in debate, tutoring low-income elementary school students and managing a demanding course load.
“Any connection I make [has] an impact in the world,” says the Falls Church teen. “Creating the space to make it happen is my metric for success.”
Liu’s real passion is politics. He is a past editor of Dialogue & Discourse, a bipartisan online forum on Medium whose contributors write about the economy, science and politics. At Meridian, he resurrected the school’s dormant debate club and was ranked first in Virginia and fourth in the nation by the National Speech & Debate Association for his oratory skills.
Though he’s known success (he finished high school with a 4.5 GPA), the 18-year-old isn’t shy about acknowledging efforts that fell short. A regular writer for the school newspaper, he applied for the editor-in-chief job his junior year and wasn’t selected. For three years he applied to a journalism camp for Asian American students and got rejected every time. And in debate tournaments, he hasn’t always made it into the final round.
“I can’t get caught up in wins and losses,” he says. Every setback is a learning opportunity. He heads to Princeton this fall and plans to parlay his love of debate into a law career. –Lisa Lednicer
Julia Kelly
Washington-Liberty High School
Julia Kelly’s hoop dreams began in fifth grade when she fell in love with the sport her father played at the University of Rochester. During her four years at W-L, the girls’ basketball team went from losing every game to winning a holiday invitational in Loudoun County that draws teams from all over Northern Virginia. At that point Kelly, a senior, was enjoying her second year as captain and relishing the chemistry on the court. “I like the teamwork aspect of it,” she says. “I look at it as an escape.”
A shooting guard who won district honors, Kelly also carried her love of the game into coaching, helping to run basketball clinics for elementary school students. As a senior, she served as head coach for the Virginia Hurricanes’ fourth grade girls B Team. (The Virginia Hurricanes offers travel basketball and flag football programs for girls.)
Basketball isn’t her only passion. From an early age, Kelly shouldered extra responsibilities at home while her parents attended to her sister, Lyla, who has cystic fibrosis. Their father travels a lot for work, and their mom often needed to be with Lyla during frequent hospital stays. Kelly stepped up in a way that changed her.
“I’ve become very empathetic, very independent,” says the Arlington 18-year-old. “I consider [my sister] one of my best friends. She’s my hero, really.”
Two years ago, Kelly started a nonprofit called Team Triumph CF that raised more than $20,000 for the pulmonary department of Children’s National in D.C. She also led an effort to deliver gift baskets to teens in quarantine in the hospital’s 7 East wing.
After graduating with an IB diploma and a 4.44 GPA, Kelly heads to Wake Forest University this fall. She wants to do research in the school’s cystic fibrosis clinic with the ultimate goal of becoming a pediatric surgeon. She has already shadowed surgeons performing more than a dozen different procedures at VHC Health and OrthoVirginia. –Lisa Lednicer
Kasim Khapra
The Potomac School
At 18, Kasim Khapra has set his sights on elected office. Someday he hopes to earn a seat in the Virginia state legislature or U.S. Senate.
He’s already well on his way to a political career, having represented the Commonwealth in the 63rd annual U.S. Senate Youth Program (which counts Sen. Susan Collins and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg among its alumni).
As president of the student body at The Potomac School, the McLean teen pushed for policy changes. In the spring of 2023, he persuaded school officials to begin offering breakfast—bagels, fruit and yogurt—to students, noting that those commuting from a long distance often didn’t have time to eat in the morning, affecting their ability to concentrate in class. Khapra lives 10 minutes away from the school, but recognized that others were at a disadvantage.
He makes a good argument. As co-captain of his school’s nationally ranked debate team, Khapra earned Academic All-American honors and was ranked No. 1 in Virginia for extemporaneous debate and extemporaneous speech. Last summer he worked for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, using data analytics to tailor her media spending strategy. He earned the role after volunteering with Terry McAuliffe’s 2021 gubernatorial bid (a campaign that resulted in a loss to Glenn Youngkin), during which he helped manage digital infrastructure for the statewide coordinated Democratic campaigns. He was 14 at the time.
That same year, he launched MyPy Coding, a nonprofit that matches students in grades 2-8 with high school coding tutors. It’s now a 501(c)(3) with several partner schools and nonprofits.
What really interests Khapra—who plans to study government and data science at Harvard this fall—is the intersection of data and policy, particularly around the issues of climate change. Last summer he worked at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, using drone imagery and spatial statistics to study best practices around crop sustainability. –Lisa Lednicer
Hope Dickson
Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School
An elementary school project is what first got Hope Dickson excited about space. She was invited to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of a satellite built by older students at St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington. After the launch, she joined Rosie Riveters, an Alexandria nonprofit that fosters girls’ interest in STEM subjects.
She was in seventh grade during the Covid lockdowns and passed the time filming her own video tutorials on how to build objects like birdhouses. In hindsight, she was documenting design considerations relating to structural integrity and the environment.
Three years later, as a participant in Virginia Tech’s summer C-Tech2 all-girls program, she and her team built a small mechanical arm that attaches to a dorm light switch and can be powered remotely via smartphone. The device solved a problem for students unable to turn the lights on and off from their bunk beds. She’s now intent on studying aerospace engineering in college.
“A lot of people see space as this big research project that doesn’t really have a purpose,” she says. “But it has so many impacts on our lives.”
A Girl Scout since kindergarten, Dickson earned her Gold Award (the equivalent of Eagle Scout) by organizing three roundtable discussions at Visitation with women in STEM fields, inviting them to share biases they’d faced in their careers. She built a hovercraft out of balloons to teach elementary and middle-school students about Newton’s laws of motion, and revived Visitation’s coding club, which designed an AI chatbot based on the teachings of St. Francis de Sales. Depending on the question, the bot can provide a quote on the virtue of love or give spiritual guidance.
Dickson graduates with a 4.98 GPA and will attend Georgia Tech in the fall on a full-ride merit scholarship. She’d like to work in the space industry someday. But there’s one career path she won’t pursue.
“I do not want to be an astronaut,” she says firmly. “I’ll build the ship to take them there, but I don’t want to be away from my life and my family that long.” –Lisa Lednicer
Luke Bode
Wakefield High School
Luke Bode has wanted to become a military physician ever since childhood, when he donned his dad’s scrubs as a Halloween costume. Fast-forward about a decade and the Wakefield graduate is soon to begin basic training at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was accepted with honors, pursuing a pre-med track.
Growing up in a military family—including a brother at West Point, a father in the Army, an uncle in the Air Force, and a grandfather and great-grandfather who were both Marines—Bode moved every couple of years. Being uprooted is part of the “sacrifice” military families willingly make, he says.
“Not only do we see our loved ones go away, perhaps overseas, but sometimes we’re moving away with them. That has instilled in me not only a sense of service, but definitely some resilience,” says the 18-year-old, who is also an Eagle Scout. He likes to quote a phrase his mother taught him: “A flower will bloom anywhere if it has strong roots.”
Bode takes service seriously. As he prepared for college, he was working on his EMT certification and volunteering alongside emergency responders in the DMV. Earlier this year he traveled with his church youth group to Tecate, Mexico, where he helped build a house for a mom of three. The experience had an impact on her life and his. “Seeing what is really happening outside of my little bubble in Arlington [helped me better appreciate] the privileges I enjoy on a regular basis,” he says.
In high school, Bode captained Wakefield’s varsity swim and rifle teams, and earned a second-degree black belt in taekwondo. Juggling a full schedule is all about “balance,” he says, including taking time to rest and recharge physically and mentally.
He’s carrying that discipline to West Point. “I can expect it’ll be challenging,” he says. “But I know I’m ready.” –Eliza Tebo
Josie Clayton
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Last February, Josie Clayton found herself in a situation few teens will ever experience—catching a pass from Eli Manning.
As a newly minted NFL Flag Player of the Year, Clayton was in New Orleans for the Super Bowl, where the festivities included walking the red carpet, attending the Big Game and hanging with the longtime New York Giants quarterback.
“It was absolutely crazy,” she says.
Clayton, 18, is a multi-sport athlete, dividing her time between flag football, soccer and basketball. During her high school years, she was a four-year varsity athlete at TJ in both soccer and basketball and played for Arlington’s Elite Clubs National League (ECNL) soccer team and the Virginia Hurricanes flag football team.
Some would argue that specializing in one sport makes an athlete more competitive. Clayton disagrees.“I’ve always loved playing multiple sports,” she says. “I think it’s helped having different skills learned from different sports.” Scanning for the ball in soccer easily transfers to the basketball court and gridiron, she contends.
Off the field, Clayton served as president of the Women in Science and Engineering Club at TJ, organizing a mentorship program for elementary students. She was a mentee herself in the U.S. Navy’s Science and Engineering Apprenticeship Program.
Come fall, she’ll be heading to Carnegie Mellon University to study chemical and biomedical engineering while simultaneously participating in ROTC at the University of Pittsburgh on a U.S. Army scholarship. She’s proudly following in the footsteps of other military family members, including her mom, who was Air Force ROTC, and a grandfather who served in the Army.
She’s excited for flag football to debut as an Olympic sport at the 2028 games in Los Angeles, and proud to have contributed to its momentum. “Women’s sports have always had the talent. It’s just a matter of having that breakthrough moment,” Clayton says. “Once you get over the cliff, the flood will come.” –Eliza Tebo
Nahom Daniel
Justice High School
Nahom Daniel’s peers took to calling him “Galileo” in fourth grade after he played the famed Italian astronomer in a classroom play. He now considers it part of his origin story as a STEM enthusiast.
In high school, the Falls Church teen joined forces with his cousins to launch Inspiring Science, a nonprofit providing free STEM enrichment to elementary students in Northern Virginia. The idea emerged after one of his cousins had serious sticker shock over the cost of a STEM camp. The free sessions they’ve organized as an alternative have explored astronomy, chemistry and environmental science topics. “We want students to have these opportunities, but it shouldn’t be at a cost,” he says.
Daniel, 18, also volunteers with Comunidad, a local nonprofit that provides academic and enrichment programming for children and adults. Having benefited from Comunidad as a youngster himself, he’s now a reading coach with their phonics-based program, Strong Readers Strong Leaders.
“I’ve worked with these students for almost two, three years now, and I’ve seen them grow so much—not just as readers, but as people,” he says.
Daniel’s parents emigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia two years before he was born, bringing with them a heritage he values deeply. During the homebound days of the pandemic, he asked his parents to speak to him exclusively in Amharic so he could better learn the language.
“When I speak to my parents in Amharic, it makes me realize [they] have given up so much,” he says. “They could be in Ethiopia right now [with family]. They gave it all up just so me and my brother could have better opportunities in America.”
He hopes to conduct medical research in college and eventually work at the National Institutes of Health. When he isn’t studying or tutoring children, he serves as a blood donation ambassador with the American Red Cross, helping donors navigate the process during blood drives.
Daniel graduated with a 4.4 GPA and plans to study biology at the University of Virginia. –Eliza Tebo
Emmet Hand
Bishop O’Connell High School
From the time he was little, Emmet Hand has loved to build things. As a 14-year-old on backyard weed-pulling duty, he decided to invent a robot that could do the job for him. He spent a year learning how to code, make circuits and solder metal, and came up with a prototype that is now awaiting review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
“The idea of being an entrepreneur really appeals to me,” he says. “I like when…something that’s failed again and again and again [finally] works and all the pieces align.”
Another of his innovations arose from tragedy. After an Arlington student, Nick Rados, was killed in a drunk driving crash in the fall of 2024, Hand was compelled to create a facial recognition system to prevent impaired driving. He shot video at a local pub and used it to train an AI model to detect visible signs of intoxication. That invention is also awaiting patent approval.
As a research intern at George Washington University the summer after his sophomore year, he designed a Python-based robot that imitates sea lions. He’s fluent in Spanish (he has family in Colombia) and founded his own LLC, Potomac Robotics.
Hand now plans to study engineering while participating in the Naval ROTC program at Cornell. Having grandfathers who served in the Navy and the Merchant Marines, he loves being on the water. In high school, he worked as a lifeguard and sailing camp counselor to save up money for his other love: flying. Enamored with planes, he took his first flight lesson at age 12 and is working toward earning his private pilot’s license.
An outside back and winger for the Olympic Development Program’s East Region soccer team (he also played soccer, wrestled and ran track at Bishop O’Connell), the 18-year-old began the collegiate athletics recruiting process but ultimately decided against playing in college.
“I would rather focus on academic things,” says Hand, who graduated with a 4.6 GPA. –Lisa Lednicer
Dayana Perez-Luen
Yorktown High School
About six years ago, Dayana Perez-Luen had a chat with her grandfather about a critical topic—education. “It’s something that no one can ever take away,” she recalls him saying. “Once you learn something, you can’t unlearn it.”
That maxim propelled her through middle and high school, and through an internship last summer with the civil engineering and design firm VIKA, where she explored practical applications for engineering and sustainable design. This fall she’ll become the first in her family to attend college.
Perez-Luen nerds out when talking computer-aided design and geotechnical tools, but her belief in the power of education has many facets. As a volunteer with True Ground Housing Partners in Arlington, she helps elementary and middle school students with academics, including poetry. She also assists with the nonprofit’s food pantry and offers Spanish translation services to residents of its affordable housing properties. When she’s not volunteering, she works part-time as a tutor with Mathnasium.
To unwind, she turns to ceramics. “It’s very hands-on. You have to focus on the clay…what’s in front of you,” says the 17-year-old. “It kind of drains away the other things that are in your head.”
After graduating with a 4.32 GPA, she plans to study civil or biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University. Her advice to high school students still finding their way? Don’t feel pressured to commit to a career path before you are ready.
“Explore,” she says. “Be comfortable with the idea of just exploring and being uncomfortable.” –Eliza Tebo