Our Featured Seniors of the 2024 School Year

One of our featured seniors is Ryan Gao, who will graduate as Valedictorian of QHSS this year. He will be attending Princeton University in the fall where he will major in Political Science and minor in Theater. This is a very fitting career path for someone, who has long been involved in our school community. Ryan’s long list of accomplishments includes being Executive President of Student Government, where he oversees all the different events and competitions at our school.

Ryan would mentor students as the Captain of Debate Club, where students would be able to develop their leadership skills and public speaking abilities. Outside of school, Ryan got a unique opportunity to dorm at Stanford University, which was an experience that made him think about slow paced west coast college, but in the end, it is not hard to understand why he decided on Princeton, a long dream of his.

In addition to his passion for law and politics, Ryan also has another dream: to become an actor on the silver screen. He has been acting since 4th grade and took part in many productions and attended programs for acting at Frank Sinatra High School. Although he would not recommend this path for everyone as “everyone’s journey to success is different,” he does point out that skills in law and acting can be transferable. Such as in Mock Trials, where the theaterics of performing are combined with law. He would transfer this principle to the QHSS Act, hoping to transform it into a less traditional Drama Club. Ryan also noted that since our school is so small, he was able to “communicate with students of different viewpoints and got to know everyone in his grade.”

He advises students to try to make connections in their future field and “do what you love.” Maybe one day, we will be able to see him starring in his very own film, as an actor, a director, and a lawyer.

Tiffany Sun is probably best known as the founder of the Queens Youth Volunteering Community, one of the biggest organizations with hundreds of students from QHSS and across the city. Unfortunately for the organization and QHSS, and fortunately for Amherst College, Tiffany will be majoring in Statistics and surely contributing to their campus life. She has always had a passion for math, saying that she really enjoyed solving statistics problems in the AP Statistics class (our editor does not understand the sentiment). Tiffany hopes that Amherst College will be able to provide a similar close community, as the school only has 2,000 students. She was able to recall many fun and notable experiences, such a sophomore year bomb threat and visits to many school events. She was also able to found her own club: QHSS Psych. Through this club, the members were able to perform many fun experiments. Outside of school, she participated in the research program at York College, which allowed her to explore various career paths. Tiffany’s advice for QHSS students is not just do things for college and take time to find their real passions. And Tiffany sees no better way to find these opportunities than to fire up the old search engine as she herself found many programs just by searching online. But you can also create new opportunities for yourself by finding a specific niche. Tiffany remembers seeing a lack of volunteering events in her community, leading her to start her own non-profit organization during sophomore year.