Posts by:
When you think of a computer science student at Princeton, you may assume they were born coding out of the womb. But for Curious Cardinals mentor Max Steinert, and many students, that's not the case at all!
Max Steinert, a Curious Cardinals mentor and current sophomore at Princeton University, is one of those students who seems to “do it all” – thriving in academics, sports, and his social life – with ease. Max grew up in Concord MA, where he was a day student, or, as he says “95% boarding student,” at the nearby boarding school, Groton. He excelled there in every department: graduating summa cum laude, a math prize-winning whiz, captain of the Varsity soccer team, and dorm prefect.
Berfin Karaman, who grew up in Turkey and pursued four years of global education for her undergraduate degree at Minerva University, has had a lifetime of experiences in her 23 years. With expertise in CSS, HTML, and Java scripts, Berfin knows her way around a website, to say the least! But Berfin’s friendly, approachable demeanor and broad worldview lend to her incredible teaching style, in which she makes coding, web design, and blogging intelligible and enjoyable for her students.
A rising sophomore, Natalie R. is an outside-the-box thinker with an entrepreneurial spirit. A longtime Curious Cardinals student and high school Ambassador, Natalie surrounds herself with passionate people and has had close exposure to a startup. So when Natalie contemplates where she wants to be in five, ten years, she’s looking beyond the traditional, well-trodden paths of “lawyer, doctor, engineer.” Through conversations with role models and members of her community, Natalie is scoping out a broader landscape of career paths and opportunities, and wanted to share her insights and wealth of knowledge with fellow high schoolers. “Chatz with Natz” was born.
Two Curious Cardinals students are proof that no matter one’s age, it is possible to take initiative to become a budding activist for our planet and sustainability.
Paulina Terrazas, a junior at Panamerican University in Mexico City, Mexico, has always enjoyed learning “a lot about things that make me understand the world better.” She has a boundless enthusiasm to improve her world, bouncing between and connecting subjects of interest: “anything that can lead me through any curious, new thing that I learned, I'll repeat it for like three weeks until I feel like it's enough and then move onto the next thing. And that's a little about what I do with sustainability.”
Eighth grader Teddy Goldwyn has been working with his mentor Charlie Paradis for over a year now. Their pairing embodies the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun” – when we sat down with both of them, they marveled as they tallied up the months they’d been collaborating together on topics ranging from NFTs, to venture capital, to entrepreneurship and sneaker culture.
When someone says “Entrepreneurship,” several iconic titans of industry and modernization may spring to mind–Industrialist Henry Ford, Apple Founder Steve Jobs, or Bumble Founder Whitney Wolfe-Herd, to name a few. But sitting down with Mentor Nicholas Pez has helped us rethink entrepreneurship’s 20th and 21st-century connotations of seemingly unattainable celebrity status.
When asked how she maintains balance between work, academics, and her social life, Harvard mentor Priya Gill recalls her “three rules”:
At 13, Lydia had one dream—become a sports medicine doctor—and knew exactly how to get there–attend the local science magnet school.