Scholar, Artist and Athlete: Teja Alapati '11 4/26/2011
It was a great week in academics, arts and athletics for senior Teja Alapati.
At the Senior Art Expo, Teja, an 8th year advanced concert pianist,
gave two piano performances, one Bach solo and one accompanying singer
Blake Murray.
As this year's tennis captain, Teja led the team to an area
championship and is now competing in the state tournament. Teja has been
playing tennis since 5th grade and has been on the varsity team
throughout his four upper school years. Teja is also captain of the
Randolph Science Bowl, Scholar's Bowl, Science Olympiad, and the math
team. He is looking forward to competing in the National Science
Olympiad in May in Wisconsin for the third time in his upper school
career.
One of the Class of 2011's 12 National Merit Finalists, Teja has
just been named one of 560 U.S. Presidential Scholar semifinalists out
of 3.2 million graduating seniors nationwide. Three other classmates,
also National Merit Finalists—Hutson Chilton, Clint Caudle and Kevin
Byrne—were initially selected as candidates for the award.
The U.S. Presidential Scholars Program was established in 1964 to
recognize and honor some of our nation's most distinguished graduating
high school seniors. In 1979, the program was extended to recognize
students who demonstrate exceptional talent in the visual, creative and
performing arts. Each year, up to 141 students are named as Presidential
Scholars, one of the nation's highest honors for high school students.
“It is extremely gratifying to see the culmination of all of my
hard work over the years and how much it has paid off,” said Teja. “I
feel happy to be recognized for my achievements. It is my passion to
compete interscholastically for my school, and I have relished
representing Randolph in all arenas, academic and athletic.”
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2.
Aadith Moorthy of Tampa, FL 2010 National Geographic Bee Champion...https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/item/speech/CREC-2010-05-28-pt1-PgE1012-5.chunk0/rep-c-w-bill-young-aadith-moorthy-of-palm-harbor-florida-wins-national-geographic-bee
http://aadithmoorthy.blogspot.com/
http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/geography-bee-champ-gets-heros-welcome/1098518
SAT Perfect Score
On the morning of March 28th 2013,
I turned on my computer along with my parents to see the scores for the SAT Tests that I took on March 9th 2013 . It so
happened that the College Board website was not functioning properly; I found
it impossible to log into my account. While getting tense every minute, I kept
trying to log in every 5 minutes. Finally my parents and I resigned ourselves
to the reality that I would not be able to view my score that day. After about
two hours, while surfing the Internet, I found a link to an alternate page to
view my score. By then, the anxiety was killing not only me but also my
parents. My father even chose to skip work. Finally, the alternate link worked
and I reached the page where my score was to be found. It said 800-800-800. My
parents and I could not believe our eyes. Was it real? Or were we just dreaming?
We refreshed the page multiple times to make sure. When I found out that I had
received a perfect score on the SAT, my countenance was truly ineffable! I
could not believe it! My parents were extremely thrilled and proud of me and I
felt a great relief within me. We
were hugging each other and yelling with tears of joy flowing down our cheeks.
This was a culmination of a year long preparation. The secret to this success is dedication and hard work. Students who wish to get a perfect score must follow a regimen for at least six months, wherein the student dedicates at least an hour a day and four to five hours a weekend. It is imperative to do as many practice tests as possible. At least for me, my scores seemed to be exactly correlated to the number of practice tests I had taken, which finally tallied to about 25. Another useful advice is to study as many vocabulary words as possible: my critical reading scores correlated with the number of words I had studied before each practice test. From a large variety of sources, I may have added nearly 5000 new words to my vocabulary since the start of my SAT preparation. Math is another area where you should not make a single mistake. In summary, ‘Perfect practice makes perfect’.
