With the salutatorian and valedictorian’s speeches having titles like “Getting a Good Life” and “Take A Chance,” it is not surprising that the graduates of Union City’s two high schools, Emerson and Union Hill, are ready to take the plunge into college life.
“Most of us have all known each other since kindergarten,” said Emerson High School valedictorian Huwaida Hassan recently. “We are very eager to get out there and start our real lives.”
However, high school has not been a completely easy ride for most of the students who just graduated. Overcoming language barriers and participating in summer programs on top of the advanced classes taken during the school year were run of the mill accomplishments for these students.
Union Hill held its graduation ceremony in the school’s gymnasium on June 22, and despite the sunshine, Emerson High School held its ceremony in the gymnasium on June 25.
Summer programs
Although Union City’s high schools have championed technology for many years, often sending their students to conferences across the nation, the leaders in the two high schools have chosen to pursue other fields in college. “I have had enough computers for a lifetime,” said Hassan, who will be studying ethics, politics and economics in Yale University in the fall and was able to teach elementary school students algebra and geometry through the Math Net program at Emerson. Hassan was also in charge of website design for the program.
However, these students were helped along the way to discover what they wanted and did not want to do. “I originally was interested in computer science,” said Union Hill Valedictorian Isis Burgos, who realized that she wanted to work in another field after her internship doing research in the computer science field. “[With these internships,] students get to experience for themselves what it is they want to do with their future.”
Burgos will be attending Brown University in the fall. She was accepted into the school’s Liberal Medical Education Program.
However, the salutatorians from both schools, Vilma Cabrera of Emerson and Jose Munoz of Union Hill, were a bit more fortunate with their summer internships.
After her sophomore year, Cabrera interned at Rutgers University in Newark researching Urban Heat Islands, which is what got her involved with Environmental Science.
Cabrera, who will be studying environmental science and English at Smith College in the fall, is looking forward to being a Teacher’s Assistant with New Jersey Institute of Technology’s summer program, which teaches elementary school children.
Munoz performed cancer research at the Garden State Cancer Center in Belleville and is now moving on to Swarthmore College to study medicine.
“I got a pretty good understanding of what science research is like,” said Munoz, who worked in the lab of the facility.
Burgos also got her first taste of the college classroom when she took a biology course at Harvard over the summer.
“Now I know what a college professor wants,” said Burgos. The Board of Education paid half of her tuition for the course.
“[The summer programs] are the reason why students at Union Hill [and Emerson] high schools are accepted to schools such as Brown and Swarthmore,” said Burgos, adding that many of the students at Union Hill were placed in summer programs, where they did research in a field that interested them.
Language barrier
However, all of these summer programs did not prepare Munoz for the hardest struggle he overcame within the Union City school district.
Munoz came to the United States from Cuba when he was a sophomore and didn’t speak English “I knew some grammar that helped me with the writing,” said Munoz. “But I couldn’t speak it.”
After working closely with the faculty at Union Hill, Munoz was able tom overcome this language barrier and excel.
“The most difficult part is learning the language,” said Burgos, who experienced this when she entered the school system from Puerto Rico at 8 years old. “Once you do that, it isn’t that bad.”
Unfortunately, the language wasn’t the only difference between Union City schools and Cuba’s schools. “There were no multiple choice tests [in Cuba],” said Munoz, adding that the students in Cuba did not get the luxury of elective classes either.
However, Hassan feels that the many different cultures and languages encountered in Union City will work as an advantage to her in college.
“I am not only bilingual, but I am accustomed to being around other cultures,” said Hassan, who speaks Arabic and some Spanish.
Even with all of this preparation, Cabrera still has one more question before she can leave Emerson.
“I wonder who is going to feed the fish when I am gone,” said Cabrera who fed the fish in the biology room twice a day her senior year.