Area high school grads reaching Olympic-level aspirations
Tens of thousands of the Houston region’s 1.3 million students are preparing to graduate high school this month. Collectively, they have created companies, participated in award-winning collegelevel research and trained to reach Olympic-level aspirations.
Here is a sampling of the class of 2024’s exemplary, humble and driven students.
Maisa Ahmad
In seventh grade, Maisa Ahmad found her voice serving as a witness for her dad’s asylum case as he fled Pakistan. It was a daunting task, speaking on behalf of her family, the weight of the case resting on her shoulders, but she stood up for her father, told their story and won the case.
The experience gave Ahmad a sense of agency and showed her how strong her voice could be. Now, she uses these skills regularly as a state and nationally ranked debater, and she hopes to continue to do so for years to come as an immigration lawyer.
Ahmad, 17, is a senior at Klein Collins High School, where she serves as an officer in the science and math national honors societies and leads the environmental club, which involves gardening at the school. She is also an EMERGE scholar, a competitive program in Houston that helps high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds apply to and thrive at the nation’s top colleges.
Finding her voice while her father was put in a refugee detention center took her dedication to finding her voice and speaking her mind to a new level.
“I’m doing something that can make a change in not only
my father’s life, but my entire family’s life. And it’s like being given that power to speak. It was just very scary, because I never had it before,” Ahmad said.
Ahmad is headed to Bard College in New York in the fall, hoping to follow the pre-law track, and she’s already on her way, with an internship at Harris County Attorney Chris Menefee’s office lined up this summer.
High school students “tend to be forgotten. And we really are just trying to get our voices heard, and be noticed by people,” Ahmad said. “And I like to think that if I can be a lawyer, I can genuinely help people and be one of the individuals who makes a change and inspires people that, ‘This country is worth it.’”
Lumiere Kahongo
When Lumiere Kahongo approaches a wrestling match against a person twice her size, she leaves it all on the mat. The 18year-old Cypress Springs High School student is ranked second in the state and aspires to qualify for the 2028 Olympics while studying to become a neurosurgeon. In her free time, she writes spoken word poetry.
And while Kahongo, the second youngest of seven siblings originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, generally weighs in at around 165, she wrestles in a weight class 20 pounds heavier, which is probably why 32 colleges and universities wanted her to wear their colors next year. (She chose the University of Jamestown, in North Dakota, because it felt most like home).
Kahongo is quick, skilled and doesn’t let her opponents use their size against her, she said. First recruited for her high school’s team in her sophomore year, she didn’t compete in the sport until her junior year. (“I learned two moves and got all the way to regionals,” she said).
Kahongo credits wrestling to helping her increase her academic drive and her confidence in her body, after being bullied for being “built like a man” in elementary school.
“I could not look myself in the mirror and find myself beautiful,” she said. “I hated my muscles, and I wanted to look different.”
But when people at wrestling tournaments asked for her workout routine because they wanted to look like her, she began to feel grateful for her body.
Wrestling has even helped her get through tough times, like when she moved out on her own in October at 18. She got a job as assistant manager at Sonic and paid her bills, while trying to maintain school and her sport.
Her grades slipped to the point that she was in danger of needing to repeat her senior year. Kahongo said she knew she was better than that, so she applied her wrestling skills to life.
“You have to be willing to persevere. You have to want to push even when it gets hard. You have to find that last gas in the tank. There has to be something there to keep you going regardless of how tough the match gets,” she said.
While Kahongo did end up moving back home this spring, her philosophy as a student athlete remains. She has to be an athlete “on and off the mat,” meaning academics are equally important to wrestling.
And if Kahongo wants to achieve her dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon — she’s known since she was little that she wanted to be a doctor watching her dad live with diabetes — she knows she has to find balance between her sport and her biochemistry major.
“Even if I don’t accomplish anything that I set out to, if I can at least make a positive impact on somebody’s life and change their life for the better, that’s all I could ever hope for,” she said. “You don’t realize people are watching … and you don’t realize the legacy that you leave behind until you have started leaving it.”
Alexander Hernandez
With Alexander Hernandez, it’s hard to know where to start.
An 18-year-old student
at the Energy Institute, a project-based learning magnet school in Houston ISD, Hernandez is the valedictorian and heading to Harvard University in the fall (after amassing over $400,000 in scholarship offers from 18 institutions that accepted him, six of them Ivy League schools).
He’s done research in prosthetics at UT Austin, the biodiversity of parks in Houston, and he’s chair of the research committee at the Mayor’s Office of Education Ambassadors, formerly the UNICEF Child-friendly cities initiative. He volunteers at a mosque near his house with refugee children from Afghanistan and Guatemala (he is the grandchild of two refugees himself ).
He’s a member of Model UN, an EMERGE scholar, and helped prototype a scrunchie with a “help” button, which sent distress alerts to someone near the person wearing it, for his senior project. Although he may have “fried” the scrunchie, (“but we don’t have to talk about that”), he’s proud of the project’s presentation. He also plays pick-up soccer, in the spare time that it’s hard to believe he has.
But based on the way he talks, it would seem juggling all these extracurricular, passion projects and academic achievements are as easy as making Pop Tarts for breakfast.
Hernandez has worked for years to reach this point, with a major assist from his dad, a first-generation Houstonian with parents from Salvador and Cuba, who has kept him on top of things all these years. It’s his dad who discovered the EMERGE program that helped make the college application process “a breeze.”
The two are very close, Hernandez said, and they took a road trip over the summer to look at colleges, but of the many schools they visited, Harvard was an easy sell.
Hernandez gave a “rational” reason for choosing Harvard: It houses one of the highest-ranked biology programs in the world, but his real reason was gut feeling.
“The second I got off the Metro, it was just like, ‘Oh my god, I love this school.’ … I didn’t have to tour it,” he said.
Hernandez’s interest in health comes from a lifetime of watching his grandparents suffer. His grandfather had Parkinson’s and died when Hernandez was in elementary school, and the next year, his grandmother was diagnosed with renal failure. He spent almost every day at the hospital after school in third grade, just witnessing it all.
Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, his grandmother got a cut and it turned into an infection, and she was hospitalized again, during which his father took a month off work to help. At the time, Hernandez was taking biology for the first time, and something clicked.
He’s hoping to study neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s in the fall, after seeing what happened to his grandfather.
“I want to specialize in making treatment,” Hernandez said. “I want to focus on being able to slow (Parkinson’s) down or maybe even stop it completely.”
Michelle Chen
Michelle Chen has won awards for college-level environmental research, co-founded a tutoring organization that serves 3,000 students internationally, competed in the chemistry olympiad, qualified for a national math competition and led an organization that seeks to make STEM learning fun — all before graduating high school.
The soon-to-be graduate of Kinkaid School, a competitive private school in the Memorial neighborhood, has achieved so much that she could compete with even the college class of 2024.
And she has. This October, Chen entered a poster competition through the Welch Foundation in Houston for undergraduate level research. Her presentation consisted of research done after two summers she spent working with a professor at Rice University, which she set up herself via a cold email in her sophomore year.
What their team came up with were hierarchically porous anodes that degrade organic pollutants like dyes and pharmaceutical pollutants using electrochemistry. Or, in layman’s terms, new ways to decontaminate water supplies. Chen’s research won first place at the competition for best undergraduate presentation, and, as if it could get any more impressive, she was the only high school student who entered.
What stands out even more is Chen’s dedication to helping others, through the tutoring nonprofit she and her friend co-founded in middle school. Everyone was home during the COVID-19 pandemic in summer 2020, and Chen saw it as an opportunity to connect with more people virtually, by offering services to students who needed help to recoup learning losses.
So, she and her two friends Presha Verma, from the middle school she attended in Alvin ISD, (Chen only spent high school at Kinkaid), and Lydia Tong, founded Vern Tutoring, a registered 501c3 nonprofit that has grown over the past four years and tutors thousands of students in both traditional subjects and non-traditional subjects, like video game design, intro to finance and poetry. The organization has expanded to New York and Pennsylvania, where other high schoolers opened chapters, and it also leads virtual summer camps. Chen and some volunteers even take time to provide in-person sup
port at schools such as Ed White Middle School, hoping to lend a hand to those who need it most.
“(The students) remind me about things about myself and the type of person that I want to be and, they teach me things intellectually, too,” Chen said. “Like yeah, I’m tutoring them, but they’re also tutoring me in kind of a different way.”
Chen plans to attend Stanford University this fall to study chemical engineering and hopes to continue her work with Vern. But first, she’ll take a break from her high-level research, spend some time traveling and look for a summer job, because she is still a teenager, after all.
Saheb Nibber
When a city planning commissioner didn’t get back to Saheb Nibber’s emails, he showed up at their home, gulab jamun in hand, asking to talk. It worked.
Arriving at someone’s doorstep with syrupy Indian sweets is exactly the kind of entrepreneurial, can’t-knock-me-down spirit Nibber exudes. A student at Awty International High School, a private school known for its cultural education, Nibber, 18, is all about finding solutions to common problems in unique ways, and he hopes to make a career out of it.
Nibber has gained city-wide prominence for starting a “hackathon” organization in 2022, called Smart City Houston, to help solve real-world problems. The hackathon competitions, which do not involve coding, are intended to get groups of innovative young people together to spend 48 hours virtually coming up with solutions to a particular problem.
For their first hackathon in 2022, Nibber asked the participants to figure out how to mitigate flooding in Houston, a problem he says has been evident for decades, yet doesn’t seem to have been fixed. The winning team came up with the idea of water-permeable roads, and they were invited to city hall to receive certificates from the mayor alongside a proclamation acknowledging their efforts.
The second hackathon took place in partnership with Rice University’s Black Houston Symposium in 2023. The winning team’s idea to create a platform that connects minority underprivileged entrepreneurs with mentors and help them get certifications, inspired Nibber to create an “impact lab” to help each hackathon solution come to life with funding and supplies. The next hackathon is scheduled for later in 2024, and will be held in partnership with Prudential’s Emerging Visionaries program, of which Nibber is a part.
Somehow, Nibber has found the time to do more than just create a company to promote the ideas of young people. He’s also sought to create solutions to problems himself and with friends.
After seeing his grandfather live through Parkinson’s disease, Nibber and a few friends thought about a way to mitigate the tremors that plague people who have the disease, so they prototyped a glove, called “React Glove” that uses small wheels spinning at high speeds, “like a fidget spinner,” Nibber explained, that are strong enough to counteract and stabilize tremors.
And then there’s “Corncrete,” an aptly named solution to the black carbon emissions caused when farmers in thirdworld countries like India burn fields of corn husks to dispose of them. Instead of burning the corn husks, Nibber and his friends found that a compound called carboxymethylcellulose could be extracted from the husks and mixed with a casein glue to create a product that mimics concrete when added to sand and water, he said. The alternative would also work to help third world countries access concrete without such high costs.
“Don’t let the people around you saying ‘no’ discourage you,” Nibber said. “A lot of the competitions I entered into I didn’t win right? They said ‘Your idea isn’t feasible,’ but I didn’t let that stop me.”
Nibber did add that it’s a good practice to always listen to, or push for, the “why” behind the “no,” but not to let it halt the process altogether.
“Do not let their constructive criticism or even their criticism stop you from doing what you believe you can do,” Nibber said.
With a head full of ideas, and the know-how it would take to build them, Nibber is off to the University of Michigan’s Ross business school in the fall to study business with a public policy lens, hoping to help solve real-world problems every day. It seems the Awty International student may already be on his way.
Lynn and Ann Nguyen
It’s almost impossible to find one thing that Lynn and Ann Nguyen, 18 year-old identical twins, don’t have in common. They’re both high-achievers with a love of violin, earning high school diplomas from La Porte high school in the same month that they’re earning associate’s degrees from San Jacinto College, both studying general studies in math and science. Lynn and Ann Nguyen are also valedictorian and salutatorian, respectively, of their senior class, a remarkable feat, and their GPAs have an almost negligible difference. Together, they volunteer at blood drives for the National Honors Society, with their Spanish teacher in a community service club called “Habla” and have the same daily schedules. They’ve both played violin since sixth grade, and it’s their favorite subject in school, along with their favorite extracurricular: they both played violin in the pit orchestra for “Cinderella” this year.
They see each other “24/7,” as Lynn pointed out. Even their parents get them confused sometimes.
The twins also enjoy a healthy competition, each helping the other strive to get the best grades in school, but the competition always stays friendly — they want the best for each other, they agreed.
It was never a question whether they would go to college separately, the two said. Lynn and Ann are both heading to the University of Texas at Austin next fall to study health and society. They’re both hoping to work in hospital administration, having grown up in a family with many physicians. They are following in the footsteps of their older sister, Lily, also the valedictorian her year at La Porte high school. Lily went to UT as well, and is now in medical school.
The only difference between the twins, at least that they shared in the interview, is their hobbies. Lynn said she has learned to crochet, mostly using her skills to create hearts and bucket hats, while Ann has taken up baking, making Vietnamese doughnuts and cookies. But the hobbies serve the same purpose: finding a way to de-stress from their academics and other activities.
Both were excited to be among the top of the Class of 2024.
“I went through so much struggle to get here, so it’s nice seeing that all the work paid off,” Lynn said.
“Honestly, I don’t think it’s fully settled in yet that I’m salutatorian,” Ann said, laughing.