news of the school
tion, three seniors who were inducted last year as juniors were honored. This year’s inductees were Class of 2009 members Emily Adams, Daniel Ash, Paul Bourdillon, Heidi Chen, Lauren George, Hannah Farley, Jessica Fisher, Caroline Huang, Sara Johnson, Mark Kershisnik, Danielle Mattingly, Molly Newell, Morgan Penny, Alyssa Sullivan, Elliott Sweeney, Sahil Yakhmi and Brenda Zhang, as well as Brent Cleveland from the Class of 2010. Seniors Erin Biel, Heidi Chen and Lee Keller were inducted as juniors last year. Park Tudor’s chapter of the Cum Laude Society, which includes faculty members and administrators who were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, elects no more than 20% of the senior class for the honor, as well as any juniors who have a 4.0 GPA. Students in grades 9, 10 and 11 who currently hold an A- average through the third quarter of this year also were honored as commended students. Two young alumni who also were members of Park Tudor’s Cum Laude Society were the featured speakers at the assembly. Annelise Pruitt ’00 and Ashwin Murthy ’01 spoke about how learning from failure and adversity can be as important as achieving success. Annelise is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Parsons School of Design and is a successful fashion designer who has done work for Ralph Lauren and Chanel. Ashwin will begin his residency in internal medicine at St. Vincent Hospital in July. SCIENCE
Middle and Upper School students competed against their peers from nine other high schools in 23 scientific events at the 2009 Science Olympiad at Butler University
on February 28. Our Olympiad team members finished third or higher in five of the 23 events that ranged from Astronomy and Physics to the Egg-O-Nautengineering competition. Alexis Fink ’12 won the Disease Detective event. Also taking home awards were freshman Bill Ristow ’12 in the Ecology and Herpetology categories and Cameron Cecil ’09 and Ryan McClure ’09 in the Electric Vehicle category. SPEECH AND DEBATE
Park Tudor’s Speech and Debate Team placed third in Class A at the State Speech Tournament on March 22. Keith Trump ’10, in his first state meet, advanced to the final round in Broadcasting and earned a fifth-place trophy. Ovini Rodrigo ’10 advanced to semifinal rounds. Seven PT speakers qualified for the state tourney, joining more than 575 speakers from 82 schools across the state. Max Thomas ’10, Lara Naanouh ’09, Haydon Osborne ’10 and Keith Trump competed in Broadcasting; Alex Sventeckis ’10 in US Extemporaneous; Kristen Rogers ’09 in Dramatic Interpretation; and Ovini Rodrigo in Original Oratory and Original Performance. TECHNOLOGY
• Park Tudor scored firstand second-place wins at the 30th annual American Computer Science League (ACSL) All-Stars competition in Huntsville, Alabama in May – the school’s highest-place finish ever at this event. Two teams of PT students qualified for the competition, at which more than 200 teams from the U.S., Canada and Europe participated in various divisions. Teams competed throughout the school year and the top scorers were invited to compete head-to-head at the All-Stars competition.
Samuel Clarke ’11, Jessica Fisher ’09, Adam Roth ’10, Jeffrey Shen ’11 and Michael Wintermeyer ’10 represented our five-person Senior team. They won the Central Division title and placed second at the All-Stars competition. Freshmen Rebecca Chen, Alexis Fink and Joey Whitaker represented our threeperson Intermediate team. At the ACSL awards ceremony, Rebecca Chen, Samuel Clarke and Michael Wintermeyer were recognized for receiving perfect scores on all the contests in the regular season. • Park Tudor teams earned third and sixth place out of 30 teams in the Association of Computing Machinery computer science competition at Miami University in Ohio on April 25. Students work in teams of up to four to solve as many problems as possible within a four-hour time frame. Our two top-scoring teams correctly solved all ten problems. Winning team members were: Third Place - Michael Wintermeyer ’10, Samuel Clarke ’11, Ted Cho ’12 and Rebecca Chen; Sixth Place - Jeffrey Shen, Richard Ni ’11, Tommaso Verderame ’11 and Erin Hoffman ’11; 28th Place - Nupur Bhatt ’12, Adam Gaynor ’12, Morgan Essex ’11 and Joey Whitaker ’12. Teams from Ohio, Michigan and Indiana took part the in competition. • Park Tudor also took the top two awards in the IUPUI High School Computer Programming Contest, winning the competition for the third year in a row. The winning team was Jessica Fisher ’09 and Michael Wintermeyer ’10. This is the second time in three years that Jessica has competed on the winning team. Second place went to the team of Samuel Clarke and Jeffrey Shen. Twentyeight students from six high schools participated in the
third annual contest. Two-person teams were presented with 10 programming problems and given three hours to write the programs. They were judged by the speed with which they completed the programs and how the programs conformed to the specifications of the problems. WORLD LANGUAGES
• Four Park Tudor students have achieved perfect scores on the 2009 Introduction to Latin National Latin Exam. Rebecca Chen ’12, Hannah Farley ’09, Catherine Mytelka ’13 and Morgan Penny ’09 were among only 386 students out of more than 17,400 who attained this distinction. Students participated from the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Italy, Mexico, Mozambique, New Zealand, Poland, Bulgaria, China and Guam. • Six Park Tudor juniors have been selected to spend six weeks in Europe this summer as participants in the prestigious Indiana University Honors Program in Foreign Languages. The program, which began in 1962, is a unique language immersion program for high-school juniors throughout Indiana. After a lengthy testing and application process, only 30 students are selected each year for each of the seven locations (two in France, one in Germany, three in Spain and one in Mexico). The students live with a host family; take daily classes in conversation, culture, literature and grammar; and pledge not to speak in English for the duration of the program. Those studying in Brest, France are Lynelle Chen, Katharine Kulka, Anju Paul, Adam Roth and Keith Trump. Brent Cleveland traveled to Valencia, Spain.
SUMMER 2009 PARK TUDOR PHOENIX 9