Alumni present Yale book awards to outstanding local high school students
The Yale Club of New Haven (YCNH) honored more than 40 talented high school students from the New Haven region on Wednesday, Oct. 15 with Yale-Seton Book Awards, carrying on a key tradition for regional Yale alumni groups around the country and overseas.
“The book award program is a solid part of the annual programming for many of our regional Yale groups,” says Nory Babbitt, senior director for clubs and association at the Association of Yale Alumni. “This past year, over 60 clubs, alumni schools committees, and individual sponsors presented over 800 books to worthy high school students.” Babbitt notes, “The book award program helps local alumni be ‘ambassadors for Yale’ and raise Yale’s profile in their home communities and it helps them engage with local schools — and in some cases it helps the students understand that they might, in fact, reach for an Ivy League school.”
The New Haven alumni program welcomes student winners, their parents and families, and high school guidance counselors to campus each fall. Winners and their guests this year enjoyed breakfast and lunch in Davenport College, tours of campus, and conversations with current Yale students from the area and members of the Yale Undergraduate Admissions Office staff.
Marta Elisa Moret ’84 M.P.H., the president of Urban Policy Strategies, a New Haven consulting firm, and the wife of Yale President Peter Salovey ’86 Ph.D., joined the winners this year to offer welcoming remarks. Herself a longtime New Haven resident and active Yale alumni volunteer, Moret told the high schools students that the award is both “a token of our pride in what you have done and a sign of the potential we know you have to do great things in the future.”
Noting “there are thousands of Yale alumni living and working in New Haven [who] are really committed to both the university and the city,” Moret also saluted the YCNH and its volunteers, including Elaine Piraino-Holevoet ’75.
Moret said that it was appropriate that the awards ceremony was held in Davenport College, as it is named for the founder of the New Haven colony, John Davenport. “New Haven and Yale are on common ground and we work together to build a stronger community,” Moret said. She encouraged all those at the awards ceremony to remember that Yale “is a resource for everyone in the New Haven region” and to celebrate New Haven as a place “with great opportunity and extraordinary assets” — including, especially, its most talented high school students.
The 2014 Seton-Yale Book Award winners and their high schools are:
Academy of Our Lady of Mercy/Lauralton Hall: Megan Hurley
Amistad High School: Shaquana Drury
Amity Regional Sr. High School: Sricharan Kadimi
Ansonia High School: Pablo Suarez
Branford High School: Megan Shea
Cheshire Academy: Stefan Wnuk
Cheshire High School: Cullem Clairmont
Coginchaug Regional High School: Tyler John McDonald
Common Ground High School: Meisha Hennessy
Cooperative Arts & Humanities Magnet: Xavier Sottile
Daniel Hand High School: Christopher Parker
Derby High School: Christopher Diaz
East Hampton High School: Yanyi Lam
East Haven High School: Natalia Wiszniewski
Engineering & Science University Anthony Festa
Guilford High School: Joseph Iassogna
Haddam-Killingworth High School: Cathrina Kothman
Hamden Hall Country Day School: Josie Maynard
Hamden High School: Julia Lynn
High School: in the Community Alif Panji Firdaus Albiruni
Hill Regional Career High School: Josue Lecodet
Hopkins School: Alexander Burdo
Hyde Leadership School: Dahlia Delahaye
James T. Hillhouse High School: Maya Duff
Jonathan Law High School: Ming-Yeah Hu
Joseph A. Foran High School: Annie Jin
Mercy High School: Allison Wojciechowski
Metropolitan Business School: Utsavi Patel
Middletown High School: Kendar Serindag
Morgan School: Jamie Naccarato
Nathan Hale-Ray High School: Amy Gionta
New Haven Academy: Colasia Claxton
North Branford High School: Maggie Vergati
North Haven High School: Ian O’Connor
Notre Dame High School: Andrew Jefferies
Oxford High School: Margaret Palys
Portland High School: Emilie MacKinnon
Riverside Education Academy Magnet: Corey Maddox
Sacred Heart Academy: Lauren Davis
Seymour High School: Nathan Hom
Shelton High School: Wesley Kocurek
Sound School: Alejandra Corona Prtega
West Haven High School: Alice Obas
Wilbur L. Cross High School: Shannon Foley
Xavier High School: Nicholas J. Indorf
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