I’m Carolyn Guo, and I graduated from Irvington in 2019.

I’m grateful for the friends that I made at Irvington, and the teachers that helped me along the way who made class more interesting and fun. I didn’t really like history in high school. But I had great history teachers like Mr. V and Miss Fields. 

I’m a Biology major, and I took Biology with Ms. Koehler and Ms. Sharma. I was interested in the material, so I got more into it. I’m glad I took biology at Irvington because that’s what led me into biology. I think AP Calculus was an important class too because it was really hard. It probably made my math skills increase a lot. For biology, I don’t have to take that much in college. But I have to take Calc Two, which is basically Calc BC. I think in general, I learned so much mathematics.

I think college is less stressful than high school because there’s no homework or quizzes or anything. When I took General Biology in college freshman year, it was just three midterms and finals. In my college classes, I also had to do research papers and things. I think Irvington probably prepared me for that. I think some people in my class never did stuff like that in their high school. All the benchmarks were so much effort, but they gave us good practice for the future. For the Change project I did cattails overgrowing at Tule Ponds. For WIP, I did access to clean water. Then, for my senior project, I did it on women and minorities in STEM, which I think was pretty cool because I got to choose my own topic and do my own little volunteer thing. 

I’m grateful to one of my friends, Nancy, who was really ambitious. She tried to make clubs and organizations, and that was really cool. It kind of made me more motivated too. I also tried to join a bunch of clubs. I tried to make an impact for my QUEST project during which I actually got to go and tutor a group of students. It felt good to make an impact. Later on, I also continued tutoring. I tutor in college and I also joined clubs. Right now, I’m grateful to friends and family, and I’m grateful to be able to attend school and get a degree, which I know some people aren’t able to.