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PLYMOUTH — Sweta Patel is enrolled in three Advanced Placement courses this year in high school, taking a class each semester at Luzerne County Community College (she took “three or four” during the summer), and will begin full-time studies at Penn State’s main campus this summer.
If things go well, she expects to start the upcoming fall semester at Penn State’s University Park already holding 22 credits toward her bachelor’s degree in biotechnology.
And by the way, the Wyoming Valley West Senior won a $10,000 Horatio Alger State Scholarship, one of only 577 awarded nationwide.
So, she’s an over-achiever, right?
“I wouldn’t describe myself as an over-achiever,” the petite senior said with a demur smile that would disarm an ogre.
Right. She leaves plenty of spare time for, what?
“I’m president of the student council,” she said with almost palpable modesty. “I’m also the president of the comic book and game club.”
Comic books as in?
“Batman, and, well, just Batman.”
And video games such as?
“Mario and Sonic. And Call of Duty. And Harry Potter, I love Harry Potter.”
A princess-rescuing plumber, a supersonic hedgehog, an infantry warfare hero and a world-saving teen wizard. Got it.
“I’m all over the place,” she laughs.
Patel admitted that getting the scholarship — named after the 19th-century American author famous for his “rags to riches” stories — left her “kind of shocked, at first. And then it just didn’t really process through for a couple days.
“I can’t believe I actually got a scholarship as prestigious as it is.”
The money is awarded to a student who, as Patel put it, “faced adversity, has financial need and is high achieving.”
Aha, “high achieving,” not over-achieving.
In the adversity part, Patel talked softly of “lots of health issues in the family, and because of that I had to grow up more quickly than I really would have wanted to.”
She credits her seventh-grade science teacher for inspiring her to pursue a career in science. By ninth grade, she knew it would be specifically related to biology.
Her long-range plan — which, at the rate she’s going, will be finished in about half the time most people would take — is to earn a doctorate in blood-borne diseases, though she hopes that the bachelor’s degree will lead to a lab job with a company eager to pay for further education.
Either way, she insists, a doctorate is in her future.
And who knows? A high-achieving, Potter-loving bio-technologist with a Ph.D.? Maybe there’s a real version of the Potter bone-restoring “Skele-Gro” potion in our future.
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