TJ Schultz
Yorktown High School
TJ Schultz is a party guy. He’s has had his own DJ enterprise since eighth grade, performing at local block parties, kids’ birthday celebrations and school dances.
In high school he added sound design to his repertoire and began working at concerts, weddings, bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, holiday fetes and Washington Spirit soccer games. His company, Varsity Sound Productions, now does 50 to 70 events a year and is so successful that Schultz files taxes on his earnings.
“My theory is to play to the crowd,” says the 18-year-old. “When it comes to having a good time, everybody loves hearing the songs they want to hear.”
He’s learned to problem-solve on the fly, as entrepreneurs so often do. Once, his soundboard died right before a wedding. Another time, rain threatened to ruin his equipment. He’s dealt with inebriated guests who were irritated he wasn’t playing the song they wanted (or playing a track they hated).
There have been shining moments, too. His biggest gig to date, a law firm’s holiday party at the Waldorf Astoria in D.C., yielded the ultimate compliment from the firm’s CEO: In seven years of holiday gatherings, this was the first time everyone hit the dance floor.
Schultz’s interest in theater production began in elementary school when his parents bought him a camcorder, prompting him to make YouTube videos featuring his younger brother and sister. During Covid, he turned his family’s Arlington basement into a film studio with a backdrop and microphones for his siblings to make gaming videos.
He more recently began staging an elaborate Christmas Village in that basement, complete with lights and a story he created and narrated about the Christmas spirit. Neighbors and anyone who needs cheering up are invited to come and watch the show for free.
“The message of the story is a gift in and of itself,” says Tammy Stoker, a neighbor and family friend. “It reminds people to be kind, work together and be patient with others—a lesson for all ages.”
For his next act, Schultz heads to Penn State, where he plans to major in theater with a concentration in sound design.
Avery Park
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Avery Park has never been one to shy away from a challenge. When the Boy Scouts—now Scouts BSA—began admitting girls in 2019, Park signed up. She and the other girls in Troop 104 were outnumbered by the boys, and she had trouble getting them to listen to her ideas.
Her response? Lead by example. She went backpacking for 12 days in New Mexico (it rained the whole time and she got hypothermia and altitude sickness); went ice fishing in Minnesota; and learned how to tie knots and shoot a rifle. In April—with 34 merit badges, 245 hours of community service and conservation work, and experience as a wilderness guide under her belt—she became an Eagle Scout.
“It taught me to become a leader,” she says.
Now 18, Park excelled in sports and academics, too. She scored a gold medal on the National Latin Exam for five years straight, served as president of TJ’s Latin Society and was captain of the girls varsity lacrosse team, earning all-district and first team (National District) honors this year. She volunteers at Doorways, an Arlington shelter for victims of domestic and sexual violence.
“Avery’s ability to pause, listen to the voices around her, bravely respond and lead her peers with empathy is what truly sets her apart,” says Joy Myers, chief development officer at Doorways.
With a jam-packed schedule, Park says she had to learn how to balance her various commitments during high school. She learned to say no to things and stop beating herself up for dropping classes she couldn’t handle.
She heads to Bowdoin College in the fall, where she plans to double major in classics and molecular biology with a minor in cognitive neuroscience. “I don’t think I need to be a perfect person every second of every day,” she says. “I’m proud of my accomplishments.”
Jonathan Bhojwani
Washington-Liberty High School
Before he sets foot on the University of Virginia campus this fall, Jon Bhojwani will have already earned two associate degrees—in information technology and science—from Northern Virginia Community College. He took multiple dual enrollment classes during his time at W-L.
NOVA is where he discovered his passion for biochemistry, which led him to take additional biochemistry classes last year at Marymount University, and to join a Marymount research project, working alongside three college students extracting bacteria from soil samples in the hopes of finding a new antibiotic. They were unsuccessful, but the work cemented his desire to find cures for diseases.
A National Merit Scholar, Bhojwani was the star quarterback of W-L’s football team during his senior year, leading the Generals to post their best season in half a century. He was chosen as the Liberty District’s Offensive Player of the Year and made the all-district team.
He’s hoping to score a walk-on spot on UVA’s roster. “I’m not very athletic; I have a good arm,” he says humbly. It’s the team aspect of the sport he loves. “Everybody has each other’s backs.”
Bhojwani’s academic and athletic triumphs didn’t come easy. Multiple moves for his father’s career meant that he started high school at H-B Woodlawn and then transferred to West Potomac High School in Alexandria before landing at W-L halfway through his junior year. With each move, he repeated the process of introducing himself to strangers and getting used to a new school culture.
An introvert by nature, he made a choice to step outside his comfort zone. “I forced myself to do things I was nervous about,” says the 18-year-old. “Making myself be with new people taught me how to reciprocate energy and have a positive conversation with someone I don’t know.”
Ruth Palmer
Bishop O’Connell High School
Ruth Palmer took up running almost by accident. After finishing eighth grade online during the pandemic, she was searching for a sport to join as a freshman at Bishop O’Connell. Running allowed her to get outside while social distancing. She joined the cross-country team and began summer practices when heat waves were setting record temperatures.
“I’m not a runner at all; it ended up being hard,” admits the Falls Church resident, who turns 18 in July. But she soon grew to love the mental challenge of pushing her body to its physical limits. “Having the mindset that you’re going to go all the way through—I try to cross the finish line with no gas left in the tank,” she says.
A longtime ballet dancer and Suzuki violinist, Palmer was also a member of O’Connell’s swim team. She sails—her family has a boat—and last year was selected for a summer leadership training program at a Christian retreat center in rural North Carolina, where she helped run a day camp for children with behavioral issues and addiction in their families, and whose parents couldn’t afford camp fees.
She recalls one camper, a first-grader, who initially lashed out when things didn’t go her way. Figuring out a strategy to calm the girl down, Palmer began taking her aside and urging her to take deep breaths and relax. Soon, the child’s behavior began improving. “She needed someone to tell her how to communicate in a healthy way,” Palmer explains. “At the end of the week, she’d tell us what her issue was. It was really impactful.”
“Ruth possesses extraordinary analytical skills, strong core values and a strong center of gravity,” says Daniel Stabile, her academic counselor at O’Connell. “Without equivocation, she is a leader and role model in all venues.”
Palmer graduated with a 4.76 GPA (the highest in her class) and will attend Wake Forest University in the fall. She plans to study engineering or chemistry and eventually get an MBA.
Jude Walker
The Siena School
There was a time when Jude Walker couldn’t envision ever going to college. As a child, he struggled to read, guessing at words and falling behind his peers. It wasn’t until eighth grade that he was diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia (difficulty with writing) and dyscalculia (difficulty understanding numbers and math).
Over his objections, his parents enrolled him in The Siena School, a private school for students with learning differences. That meant a 35-minute commute to Silver Spring, Maryland, from his home in Arlington.
His freshman year at Siena was online, which made for a rocky start, but the return to the classroom in 10th grade was a game-changer.
“I realized I was learning more and getting a better understanding of how to complete my assignments,” says Walker, now 18. “Everyone is seen; every student knows every teacher.”
He was chosen by the head of school to be a student ambassador, mentoring new students. As a senior, he was accepted to nine colleges. This fall he’ll begin classes at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he plans to major in sports management.
“He went from being a student unsure of himself to one who really flourished,” says Warren Phenegar, a teacher at Siena. “It’s been incredible watching him blossom into a leader.”
In addition to taking honors-level classes at Siena, Walker was a point guard and two-time captain of the varsity boys basketball team. He has twice made the Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association All-Star game as a starter, and referees youth basketball and flag football on weekends. During the summer, he works as a counselor at an Arlington camp for children with disabilities.
For his senior year independent project, Walker collected book donations for young children in Rwanda through the nonprofit Afrikan Baby Book Project.
The boy who once struggled to read ended up giving others the gift of literacy. The significance of the journey isn’t lost on him. “They all had a smile on their faces and appreciated the books,” he says. “It was great.”
Jackson Danzig
Yorktown High School
Teen drug overdoses have turned deadly, and Jackson Danzig believes local schools haven’t done enough to address the crisis. As a junior, he co-founded S.H.A.R.E. (Students Having Access to Resources and Education), a group that arranged Narcan training for every Yorktown sports team. Now, more than 400 of his classmates know how to recognize the signs of an opioid overdose and administer the overdose reversal drug Naloxone.
“It’s not a subject people want to talk about,” says the 18-year-old, who has seen family friends struggling with addiction. “But it’s a subject that needs to be talked about.”
A lacrosse player since seventh grade, Danzig was a Yorktown midfielder, winning all-district honors in 2023. In June of that year, after helping organize a fundraiser for Lacrosse the Nations, a D.C.-based nonprofit that introduces the sport to kids worldwide, he and his teammates spent a week in Tenjo, Colombia, running after-school lacrosse clinics for youth in that village. “It was eye-opening,” he says. “Seeing them learn a new game was heartwarming and rewarding.”
Danzig has found plenty of success off the field, too. As a sophomore, he landed a computer programming internship with Inspirit AI, a mentorship program for students interested in artificial intelligence, where he developed an algorithm that predicts stock prices and researched neural language processors.
A member of Yorktown’s debate team, he graduated with a 4.4 GPA and was a finalist for a full-ride scholarship to UVA. But his dream has always been to go to college in California. As the oldest of three boys raised by a single mom, he has an interest in economics, and chose the University of California at Berkeley for its top-ranked econ program.
Gabrielle Gilbert
Wakefield High School
Gabrielle Gilbert didn’t just learn marketing from the ground up. She seems to get it intuitively. During the pandemic, her mom, who owns an engineering firm, needed help with a Pay-It-Forward fundraising campaign her company created to help 26 small businesses with grants and resources. Gilbert stepped in and created a website for the campaign as part of her eighth-grade international baccalaureate (IB) project.
Since then, the enterprising teen has been committed to providing affordable marketing solutions. “I found what I love to do by accident,” she says. “A lot of businesses, nonprofits and individuals needed help. I was good at it and kept doing it.”
With more than 30 projects under her belt, she has branched out beyond Arlington. As a 16-year-old intern with Boys Town Washington DC, she ran the group’s Instagram account, revived its LinkedIn presence and helped promote its programs to young donors. She developed marketing materials for a tae kwon do camp and was vice president of Wakefield High School’s chapter of DECA, an organization that prepares students for careers in marketing, finance, hospitality and management.
Gilbert, now 18, also served as vice president of Wakefield’s Black Student Union and was a varsity cheerleader. She volunteers at the Arlington Food Assistance Center, and two years ago joined her family on a trip to Tanzania, where they helped lead STEM activities for girls in a local school.
As principal of her own marketing firm, MOGAL (a play on the word mogul), which she launched last summer, she creates marketing solutions, branding and social media campaigns. She plans to keep the business going when she heads to Hampton University, which she chose—unsurprisingly—for its five-year bachelor’s/MBA program.
Aisling O’Keefe
H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program
At 18, Aisling O’Keefe has more theater and film experience than most people her age. As a high-schooler, she directed three plays, was the assistant director on two others, produced two performances and acted in 11 shows as part of H-B Woodlawn’s student-directed theater program. She also took film classes through a workshop at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she now plans to study TV and film production in the fall.
“I love observing life, observing the small moments and turning them into something bigger,” she says. “Showing people’s differences and incorporating that into stories.”
O’Keefe initially focused on acting, but later turned to directing and producing. Last year she wrote and directed a play called ORANGE about five teens who sneak into their high school at night to have a sleepover. When an unknown disaster occurs outside the school, the dialogue turns to sibling, friend and romantic relationships as the characters wonder about their future.
In the spring of her senior year, she directed Girlhood, written by D.C.-based playwright Dani Stoller, which focuses on a group of teenage girls who hang out underneath an abandoned overpass.
In 2023, a playwriting contest issued by D.C.’s Mosaic Theater Company challenged entrants to answer to the prompt What does justice mean to you? O’Keefe wrote Stop and Think, Please—about a sister and brother who encounter a homeless man sitting outside their apartment. After the sister gets into an argument with the man, she and her brother eventually talk to him, learning about his life and about one another. The play won third place.
O’Keefe was born with achondroplasia and is 4 feet 3 inches tall. She says her condition rarely hinders her. Her ultimate goal is to run her own film production company.
Joseph Sparks
Arlington Tech
Joseph Sparks is a modern Renaissance man. As a student at Arlington Tech, he earned an associate degree in computer science through a dual-enrollment program at Northern Virginia Community College. He’s a junior assistant Scoutmaster, has sung baritone in productions at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center as part of the National Children’s Chorus, ran track for Wakefield High School, and in 2022 spent seven weeks learning Chinese in Taiwan. Last summer he studied astrophysics in a five-week program at the University of North Carolina.
His ultimate goal, he’ll tell you, is to contribute to a discovery that improves human understanding. His favorite scientist is the 16th-century astronomer Galileo, who discovered the moons of Jupiter through his use of a telescope. “He combined engineering and science to improve access for regular people,” says the 17-year-old. “Astronomy grew as a field. Now hundreds of kids in America have telescopes in their backyard.”
Sparks was raised in Arlington by a single mom from Colombia. She enrolled him in programs that offered exposure to positive male role models, including Big Brothers/Big Sisters. His “big brother,” who attended his high school graduation, left a big impression on him.
“His willingness to be there, even though we weren’t related by blood, just because of his sense of goodwill, was really impactful,” Sparks says. “I definitely want to give back any way I can.”
As an informal leader at Arlington Tech, Sparks met daily with fellow Hispanic and Black male students to swap tips on applying to college, setting career goals and achieving personal growth. They held each other accountable and boosted each other up. “There aren’t a lot of Latino students in the classes I take, so it can be difficult to fit in,” he explains.
He now heads to Princeton on a four-year, full-ride QuestBridge scholarship and is considering majoring in astrophysics.
Olivia Bartrum
Wakefield High School
Olivia Bartrum’s interest in science began in childhood when she underwent treatment for kidney cancer. Now in remission, she devotes much of her free time to medical research at Children’s National Medical Center, where she is a student intern, and the National Institutes of Health. “I’ve had friends pass away; I had a friend who relapsed five times,” says the 18-year-old. “It’s a horrible disease. I don’t want other kids to suffer like I and my friends suffered.”
Bartrum is already working toward that goal. As a junior, she won a third-place award at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair for her project examining different ways that bodies can absorb medication. This year, she earned a second-place nod for her investigation of immunotherapy treatments for cancer and viral disease.
For her AP Seminar class at Wakefield, she researched HIV transmission through blood and cornea donations, as well as the effectiveness of psychosocial intervention in mitigating PTSD in cancer survivors—something she struggles with personally. At Children’s National, she is working on a cancer immunotherapy project funded through a $25 million NIH grant.
Outside the lab, Bartrum has lobbied Congress for more funding for cancer research, and last year helped raise $250,000 for the American Cancer Society. At Wakefield, she played alto sax in the marching, jazz and symphonic bands; captained the girls tennis team; was a student liaison to the Arlington School Board; and served as president of the science, math, French and National Honor societies. She plans to double major in biomedical engineering and chemical engineering or applied math at MIT.
“Many people [say] ‘I want to cure cancer’ to express their dreams of doing something significant,” says Dan Harris, Bartrum’s AP Physics teacher at Wakefield. “When Olivia says this, she literally means she wants to find a cure. I think she just might do it.”
William “Alex” Abraham
McLean High School
For as long as he can remember, Alex Abraham has loved math and science—math especially. “I’m a very logical person,” says the McLean teen. “Being able to see the steps you take to get an answer makes more sense to me than having multiple answers and all are equally good.”
As a freshman at McLean High School, Abraham started a math tutoring business. By senior year, he was a teaching assistant for his AP Calculus teacher and was taking dual-enrollment classes in linear algebra and multivariable calculus at George Mason University. He was invited to attend two weeklong summer programs at the NASA Wallops Island Research Facility and the NASA Langley Research Facility. His math and science teachers nominated him for the Rensselaer Medal, which awards scholarships to outstanding high school math and science students. He won.
Outside the classroom, Abraham’s passion is gymnastics. As a kid, he loved hockey and wanted to be a goalie, but was told he needed to be more flexible. He tried gymnastics and got so hooked on the sport that he traded ice for aerials. Now he trains 15 hours a week with the Dynamic Gymnastics club team. His competition scores for the pommel horse, rings, vault, high bar, parallel bars and floor exercises have qualified him to attend USA Gymnastics’ Eastern National Championships three times. Ten years of acrobatics have left him with wrist, ankle and back problems, but he has no regrets.
“You kind of feel like you’re defying gravity doing all these flips and twists,” says the 17-year-old. “It takes a long time to get the skills, and even longer to perfect them.”
Abraham’s work ethic extends to his volunteer activities, too. He has run three coat drives for the pediatric unit at VHC Health, collecting more than 500 coats in three years and winning an award from the McLean Citizens Association.
This fall, he’ll attend Georgia Tech, majoring in material science and engineering.
Marion Beasley
Yorktown High School
For much of her life, Marion Beasley felt isolated. As the daughter of an active-duty Marine, she moved around a lot in elementary and middle school. She started freshman year at Yorktown during the pandemic, which made it harder to make friends. And though she is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she has never lived among large concentrations of
Native Americans who share that identity.
In middle school, she remembers being shocked when one of her peers asked, “Are all Native Americans extinct?” The classmate had no idea that the Lumbee are the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and one of the largest in the country. “I’ve always felt underrepresented,” says Beasley, now 18. “For centuries, so many Native Americans were persecuted and weren’t able to share their heritage with the world.”
That’s partly what strengthened her resolve to raise awareness of Native American cultures and customs. As a sophomore, she worked with four other Indigenous students to craft a statement acknowledging that Yorktown’s building stands on the ancestral homelands of the Piscataway tribe. She established a Native American Student Union, organizing fundraisers in support of nonprofits such as People, Not Mascots, which urges majority-White high schools to remove racist Native American mascots.
Her long-term goal is to become a lawyer and fight for federal recognition for her tribe. “For me, it’s recognizing the people who were here before us,” she says.
Drawing upon her heritage in her AP Biology class, Beasley spent a year studying how oysters in North Carolina’s Lumbee River filter out water pollutants. She won a grant from the American Indian Science and Engineering Society to continue her research and was assigned a mentor from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
She also captained Yorktown’s Swim and Dive team and participated in the Virginia Model General Assembly, where she was elected speaker of the House.
This fall, Beasley will attend Dartmouth—one of only a few colleges, she notes, with a major in Native American and Indigenous cultures.
Lisa Lednicer is a writer and editor in Arlington.