Brianna Gilbert
Wakefield High School
Brianna Gilbert was an eighth grader at Thomas Jefferson Middle School when she raised $2,000 for Nurturing Minds, a nonprofit that provides technical and financial support to SEGA Girls’ Secondary School in Tanzania. That summer, she traveled to Africa to volunteer at SEGA and created an entrepreneurship contest for its small-business program. Since then, she and her sister, Gabrielle (a 2024 Extraordinary Teen winner), have raised $25,000 for the school.
“Seeing the value of women’s education [there] has impacted my desire to improve education in the United States,” says the 18-year-old.
At Wakefield High, Gilbert served as president of the Black Student Union, vice president of the History Honor Society and president of her senior class. She launched a program called Fast Track that pairs high-achieving students with underserved middle-school students as mentors.
She’s an athlete, too. As a freshman member of the crew team, she earned silver in state competition. This year she garnered an All-District Honorable mention in girls’ basketball.
Gilbert’s accomplishments are all the more remarkable in light of the concussion she sustained in a basketball game sophomore year. For weeks, she couldn’t see well enough to read, and for nine months she suffered from debilitating headaches. She missed so much school that a counselor raised concerns about her college prospects.
She ended up graduating with a 4.23 GPA and is attending Howard University on a full scholarship, after which she plans to pursue a combined law and PhD program, and a career in education policy. “I think of what legacy I want to leave,” she says. “I want to be that support. I want to be that change.”
Hannah Boesen
Meridian High School
Music has long been Hannah Boesen’s passion. As a child, she sang in a church choir, took piano and guitar lessons, taught herself the electric bass guitar and auditioned for the Children’s Chorus of Washington, eventually touring with the group in Eastern Europe.
In high school, she founded a band called Verb, writing music and lyrics, managing its social media presence and ensuring its songs were on Spotify.
A member of The Porter’s Gate, a Christian music collective that includes songwriters, musicians, scholars, pastors and music industry professionals, she calls singing her “guiding force.”
“It’s stabilized me as an individual,” says the 18-year-old. “It is such a luxury that has allowed me to have something that’s my own but can be shared.”
Boesen has been involved with Girl Scouts since kindergarten and is dedicated to serving others. As a youngster, she watched her father teaching English to families of diplomats through a school he ran. During the pandemic, he stopped taking a salary but kept his students engaged, organizing museum outings and hosting monthly potlucks.
“It was really beautiful,” she says. “That’s what really influenced me—seeing how to integrate work and service, how to build things for other people.”
As a junior at Meridian, Boesen was selected for a yearlong fellowship with Operation Understanding DC, which trains future social justice leaders to recognize and challenge discrimination. An 11-day civil rights trip through the South opened her eyes to the lingering effects of segregation and environmental racism.
These days, she volunteers with Arlington’s Restoration Immigration Legal Aid Clinic, providing on-site childcare for immigrants who come to the clinic for pro-bono legal assistance.
Boesen graduated with a full IB diploma and a 4.4 GPA, and is heading to Taiwan on a U.S. State Department scholarship, where she’ll learn Mandarin. When she returns after a full academic year, she plans to attend Northwestern University.
Jack Woda
Bishop O’Connell High School
Jack Woda was a junior at Bishop O’Connell when he committed to college at East Carolina University. A Division 1 baseball recruit and star catcher, he’s aiming for the Majors. Some MLB scouts already have him on their radar.
As a kid, Woda also played soccer, basketball and football. He decided to focus exclusively on baseball in high school, even though it wasn’t his best sport. He’ll tell you he was the weakest player on his travel team.
But his determination was formidable. During the pandemic, his family built a batting cage in their backyard so he could work on his swing. “I fell in love with hard work,” he says. “Once I figured out how to get good, it was like a rocket ship, getting better and better.”
As a sophomore and junior, Woda made the first team in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference and was twice selected for the USA Baseball National Team Development program. He launched Baseball Cares, a one-day free program for youth ages 12 to 14, soliciting equipment donations and enlisting area Division 1 players as coaches.
Now 18, he’s a knowledgeable resource for parents who are curious to learn more about how college sports recruiting works.
Baseball doesn’t require you to be the biggest, the tallest or the smartest player, says Woda (he’s 5-foot-10). But it does require discipline. “Just working hard and being consistent will take you anywhere.”
Aliyah Majeed-Hall
The Potomac School
Childhood summers on the Delaware Bay were formative for Aliyah Majeed-Hall. Horseshoe crabs and blue herons left her awestruck, as did nature hikes with her family. She became a vegetarian at age 9 because she decided it was unethical to eat animals.
During the pandemic, she picked up a geometry textbook she found lying around the house and was captivated. Since then, she’s sought out projects that combine her interest in math and the environment. “I’ve always loved puzzles and riddles,” she says. “One of my favorite things about science is I get to solve environmental problems.”
Majeed-Hall spent the summer before her junior year as an intern with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, measuring greenhouse gas emissions from trees. She went on to develop a physics-based model to trace emissions in forests, for which she was named among the top 300 scholars nationwide in the Regeneron Science Talent Search.
She also volunteers at Affordable Homes & Communities (AHC), an affordable housing nonprofit in Arlington. Noticing that many of the kids she was mentoring didn’t have books of their own, she organized a series of book fairs, soliciting donations from family, friends, bookstores and book publishing companies. Her One Word Reading Initiative has distributed more than 5,000 books to low-income families. The “Today” show featured her in a segment in March of 2025.
At The Potomac School, Majeed-Hall maintained a 4.0 (unweighted) GPA and was a member of the varsity swim and soccer teams. She was recruited to play goalie at MIT, where she’ll be a first-year student this fall. She plans to double-major in climate systems engineering and math. Her ambition is to solve leading climate problems of the future.
Devesh Stansbury
Washington-Liberty High School
At 18, Devesh Stansbury is already a serial entrepreneur. A childhood hobby trading sports cards for cash led him to start trading stocks at the end of eighth grade. Two years later, he developed a gamified money-management app called Firefly Finance that helps middle and high school students develop financial literacy.
The app, which includes quizzes, a compound interest calculator and tools to help users evaluate risk, won state and national awards from the Future Business Leaders of America.
As a junior at W-L, Stansbury developed a student journalism platform called LegiLight where student writers could post commentary and analyses of global issues. The site published 54 submissions and reached 500,000 readers through social media, he says.
That same year, Stansbury became the advocacy director for Virginia High School Democrats, leading a coalition of students in support of a bipartisan state bill requiring digital literacy be taught in Virginia schools. He testified during a House subcommittee meeting alongside the chair of Virginia High School Republicans. The bill cleared the General Assembly and was signed into law by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
“People with political power are [more accessible] than you might think,” he says. “It takes ability to speak and advocate for yourself to close that barrier. It’s important to do your best to improve the lives of as many people as possible.”
Stanbury applied early-decision and was admitted to The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from W-L with a 4.59 GPA and plans to major in economics, with a concentration on finance and economic policy.
Lilianna DeGisi
Yorktown High School
Lilianna DeGisi learned how to handle guns responsibly at an early age, with guidance from her father, and fell in love with the sport of shooting after attending a hunting and fishing camp. By age 14, she was the U-18 women’s state champion in trap shooting.
A three-year captain of Yorktown High School’s precision rifle team, she twice competed in the USA Shooting National Junior Olympics, representing the state of Virginia in 2025 and 2026.
Riflery requires agility and a mastery of different types of rifles and pistols, but “it’s mostly mental,” says the 18-year-old. She attributes much of her success to controlled breathing and timing her heart rate to when she pulls the trigger. She’s at the gym almost daily, strengthening her core, arms and back, and she practices year round.
Maintaining confidence is the hard part, she says, recalling how she tried out for Junior Olympics as a sophomore but “completely panicked” and was cut. A year later, she overcame those jitters and made the team.
DeGisi had enough credits to graduate early from Yorktown, but opted to pursue dual enrollment classes in medical terminology, history and communication through Northern Virginia Community College. She volunteers at VHC Health’s radiology department and is training to become an EMT. She hopes to become a surgeon for the military.
This fall, she heads to the University of Tennessee, where she was accepted into the Honors College. She chose the school partly because the campus is within walking distance of three hospitals, where she aims to work as an emergency room technician between classes.
“I thrive when I’m busy,” she says. “I need something to do all the time.”
Colton Moore
St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes School
Colton Moore can trace his love of robotics back to his childhood in Arlington, when he learned how to program robots using Legos. As a middle-schooler, he began tinkering with 3D printers, designing and fabricating household accessories such as a phone stand and a TV-remote holder.
This fall, the 4.0 (unweighted) student will attend Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he’ll major in mechanical engineering. He hopes to one day build robots that go into space. “I really enjoy making a prototype and seeing it start to exist,” he says, “putting in all the work and seeing it do stuff.”
Moore, 17, was captain of his school’s robotics drive team and an integral member of various classroom engineering projects—including one in which he designed a small bridge capable of supporting his body weight. He also built a robot capable of moving furniture.
A third-degree black belt in tae kwon do, Moore earned his Eagle Scout badge at age 13, building picnic tables for a church preschool during the pandemic. He’s been wrestling since eighth grade and captained St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes School’s wrestling team during his junior and senior years.
Last summer, he attended a NASA-affiliated program, Virginia Aerospace Science and Technology Scholars, joining students from across the state in planning a mission to Mars. “Space is the next place humanity will explore,” he says. “It’s fascinating to me.”
Tony Madigan
Arlington Tech/Wakefield High School
Perhaps Tony Madigan was destined to become a rower. Both of his parents rowed for the U.S. National Team. His dad, now a coach at Potomac Boat Club in Georgetown, has coached Olympians in the sport.
Madigan was in seventh grade when his parents signed him up for rowing camp. Once he beat his older brother in a race, he was all in, joining the crew teams at Wakefield High School and the Potomac Boat Club. Last year he won the USRowing Men’s Youth Single National Championship in Sarasota, Florida. As a member of the U.S. Men’s Junior National Team, he represented the U.S. at the U19 World Rowing Championships in Lithuania, taking fifth place in the men’s single sculls.
He’s not resting on his laurels. “No one ever rows perfectly. There’s always something you can work on to maximize your efficiency and keep getting better,” says the Arlington teen. He practices 3.5 hours a day, five days a week, putting in additional time on Saturdays.
Standing 6-foot-4, Madigan also captained Wakefield’s junior varsity basketball team his freshman and sophomore years. He volunteers as a coach with Arlington Recreational Basketball, is an Eagle Scout and plays the baritone. (He held first chair in Wakefield’s symphonic band for two years before rowing became a priority.) He rounded out his high school experience by taking dual-enrollment classes (English, television production, government, environmental science) at Northern Virginia Community College through Arlington Tech.
This fall, he’ll be one of eight incoming first-year students on Stanford’s rowing team. An aspiring history or political science major, he was also recruited by Harvard, Brown and Yale, but was drawn to California’s more temperate climate. “I’m tired of cold, tired of water freezing,” he says. “It won’t freeze in the San Francisco Bay.”
Dafnee Marquez Padilla
Arlington Career Center
Dafnee Marquez Padilla knew very little English when she and her family emigrated from El Salvador four years ago. She grew up cooking over a wood fire and washing her clothes in a river.
“When I started high school, I was very unsure of myself,” says the Arlington teen. “I used to be the only student who never talked.”
Today, she’s aiming to study business management in college, having graduated from the Arlington Career Center with a 3.7 GPA. She dreams of becoming an entrepreneur and launching her own clothing line.
As a high school student, Marquez Padilla took dual enrollment classes at Northern Virginia Community College, including calculus, physics and U.S. government. A leader in the Career Center’s JROTC program, she was named 2024 “Student of the Year” by the D.C.-based Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents. The shy girl who never spoke up in class is now a mentor for other English language learners.
Now, whenever she’s invited to speak in front of a group, “I always say yes. I can do presentations without feeling nervous,” she says. “I feel comfortable.”
At 20, Marquez Padilla is older than most recent high school graduates. She arrived in the States having completed high school in El Salvador, but was told she needed to repeat high school in the U.S. for her credits to be accepted for college. At first, she balanced her classes with 40-hour workweeks at a pizza shop. Today she’s working part-time at a café while she applies for college scholarships. She and her family members all have green cards.
Curious by nature, Marquez Padilla took aviation classes at NOVA. She has flown in the cockpit with a flight school instructor and hopes to someday earn her private pilot’s license. “I never imagined myself doing that,” she says, “coming from living in a small place.”
Lucas Jones
McLean High School
Donald Rumsfeld, Jimmy Carter and Beau Biden had one thing in common: They all played sprint football in college. This fall, Lucas Jones will join their ranks as a new recruit at the University of Pennsylvania. Sprint is tackle football designed for a lighter weight class; all players must be under 183 pounds.
Jones, 17, was captain of McLean High School’s football team, a four-year member of its Model U.N. team, and vice president of community outreach for its chapter of DECA, an organization that prepares students for careers in marketing, finance, hospitality and management.
He also served as president of the Best Buddies club, which matches students with developmental and intellectual disabilities with neurotypical peers. Under his leadership, some meetings drew as many as 80 participants, and the club’s Instagram account accumulated more than 500 followers.
“Growing up biracial in a predominantly white area, I’ve always been big on making sure people who aren’t able to have a voice have one,” Jones says.
The summer before his senior year, he participated in Virginia Boys State, a leadership and civics program in which high school students create a mock government that holds elections and passes bills. After campaigning but failing to secure a spot on the Supreme Court, he won a Senate seat and was elected Senate president. Boys State “is the one week where you can reinvent yourself,” a counselor told him. He took that advice to heart.
“His leadership made me passionate about public service,” says the McLean teen. “I want to help pave the way for other people to succeed in life.”
Jones graduated with a 4.34 GPA. He intends to earn a law degree and eventually enter politics.
