★ ★ ARKANSAS TIMES ACADEMIC ALL-STARS ★ ★
1st Chair
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A man with a plan
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evin Tzeng remembers getting off the bus on a cold, windy morning, instrument in hand. He’s in a large group, each person looking for a place to practice. Jevin finds an empty stairwell and tapes his music to the wall. As his time comes, he walks to the audition room and hears the competitor before him. She’s very good. Then he’s in the audition room, facing the blank curtain held between JEVIN TZENG competitors and judges. He plays. Hours pass as competiAge: 17 tors await decisions from the judges. “Finally, the violin list Hometown: Conway is posted and topping the list is my name; I am 1st chair and School: Conway High concertmaster of the Arkansas All-State Orchestra!” School-West Jevin’s unsure when he started playing the violin. “I Parents: Jason Tzeng and think I was 5 or 6. I’ve been doing it a long time.” He’s Cathy Yang taught violin to younger players at summer music camps, College plans: University and performed at many events to promote music in general of Arkansas at and the Conway School Orchestra. Fayetteville, Vanderbilt The violin is far from his only interest, though. He’s a member of the varsity soccer team, the Student Congress, the Quiz Bowl team, and the National Honor Society. He’s a National Merit Semifinalist and an AP Scholar with Distinction. He led the Special Event Committee of the Faulkner County Youth Leadership Program when it renovated and painted a Boys and Girls Club gym. And he organized, refereed and hosted a series of dodge ball tournament to raise funds for local charities. Jevin plans to major in biomedical engineering/pre-med.
ake Windley’s resume reads like the resume of a lot of other Academic All-Stars. He’s a straight-A student, a National Merit Semifinalist and a member of the Searcy High student council. But unlike some of his peers, Jake has definite plans for his future. He’s going to stay in Searcy and attend Harding University, major in chemistry, attend law school and work in patent law. If finding a job JAKE as an attorney continues to be difficult, Jake says he’ll work WINDLEY as a chemist: “Everyone’s always going to need chemists.” Age: 18 But his big end dream? To become a U.S. senator. Hometown: Searcy “When you go vote, often it’s choosing the lesser of two School: Searcy High School evils. I think to make a big change the best way is to get out Parents: Jonathan and there and do it yourself.” Tracy Windley Jake even has his retirement planned. He wants to travel College plans: Harding the world. This summer, he’ll get a head start with a twoUniversity week trip to Greece and Italy with Harding University that will trace St. Paul’s journey through Corinth, Ephesus and Rome. After Jake outlined his life plan, a reporter asked him if he had anything else to add. “One thing,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect. “I am Iron Man.” A joke, sure. But maybe it should be a contingency plan, too. After all, before Jake had to take a break to concentrate on his studies, he was close to earning his black belt in Taekwondo. When he was younger, he competed in the AAU Nationals and the Junior Olympics, where he took home silver and gold medals. And he describes his role on the Searcy High Quiz Bowl team as the “Swiss Army knife of the group.” Sounds like the stuff of a superhero origin myth.
Math MVP
Hitting a high water mark
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avid Ye likes math puzzles. When he was a sophomore, he won the Arkansas State Science Fair for an algorithm he devised to express how many moves it takes to solve the stacked-disk game Tower of Hanoi. Last summer, at MIT’s Research Science Institute, he worked on a coin-weighing problem that asks the question, “If we’re given 100 coins four of which we know to be counterfeit DAVID YE and of a different weight, how many coins can we guarAge: 17 antee to be genuine in two weighings on a pair of scales?” Hometown: Little Rock That puzzle, or perhaps more precisely, what David genSchool: Little Rock eralized from it, was good enough to later earn him one of Central High School six spots in Los Angeles as a U.S. finalist for the internaParent: Vivian Ye tional Shing-Tung Yau High School Mathematics Award. College plans: undecided Furthermore, it was good enough to send him to Beijing as one of two U.S. finalists advancing to the international event. Unfortunately, the competition coincided with Central’s semester tests, and he wasn’t able to go. David says he’s really been enjoying math lately, but as his academic record indicates — perfect scores on the ACT and SAT, top of his class at Central High with a 4.5 GPA, National Merit Semifinalist, National AP Scholar — he’s no slacker in other areas of studies. In fact, broad “curiosity” is the quality for which he takes the most pride in himself, he wrote in his Academic All-Stars essay. “It is what drives me to search in the appendices of my textbooks for further explanations of given theorems ... and to read far beyond the required readings. It can transform a physics reading into Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time,’ a straightforward combinatorics problem into an exercise in the use of generating functions, Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ into a brief foray into the Igbo language.”
18 APRIL 27, 2011 • ARKANSAS TIMES
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hen Eric Zheng explains that his best stroke in swimming “is all of them,” he’s not boasting. The 100-meter individual medley, a race that combines the butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle, is his best event. He currently holds the state high school record ERIC ZHENG in the event, and it’s helped him become “the most outAge: 18 standing swimmer in the history of the school,” according Hometown: Little Rock to Pulaski Academy counselor Cheryl Watts, as well as a School: Pulaski Academy two-time National Interscholastic Swimming Coaches AsParents: Fang and sociation All-American. Jinhong Zheng Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Eric chose a fish as College plans: Harvard, his test subject for his honors independent research project Yale, Princeton or Duke on genetics, though for this project, he had to forget that the fish was indeed a fish. Convinced of the folly of a proposal made by a group of Canadian scientists to create a small scanner capable of processing DNA to identify unknown organisms, Eric instead tried to use simple molecular biology techniques not in standard practice to identify his “unknown” organism. In other words, he was testing his test. “It was completely successful,” he reports. That sort of elegance is what draws Eric to biology, which he plans to pursue in college. “I find it fascinating — the complexity of everything, how it’s so fine-tuned and interacts so delicately.” Even with his success in the pool, his work in the lab, his 4.75 GPA, his perfect ACT score, his National Merit Semifinalist Award and his achievement as a U.S. Presidential Scholar Semifinalist, Eric says he takes the most pride in his leadership of the senior class, as student council president, on the school’s annual canned food drive for the Arkansas Foodbank. This year, his class raised more than $5,000, enough for $25,000 cans.