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Overcast Top BHS seniors reflect, look toward future
Connor Mack and Chelsea McGowen have known each other since third grade, when they met weekly as part of the school district’s former Program for the Academically Gifted to work on projects.
Now seniors at Baldwin High School, the two see a lot more of each other in classes and extracurricular activities. They have also been linked since October, when it was announced that they were the top two students in BHS’s class of 2015.
Mack, the valedictorian, edged out McGowen, the salutatorian, by a small margin — his weighted grade point average is 120.09, while hers is 119.94.
A 17-year-old who attended Milburn Elementary School, Mack will attend the Honors College at SUNY Buffalo in the fall, where he plans to double major in mechanical and aerospace engineering. It was the robotics program at BHS, he said, that made him realize what he wanted to do with his life. “I’ve always been interested in building,” he said. “For a while I thought I’d be an architect, but then I got into robotics and I realized that engineering was way more my thing.”
McGowen, 18, a former Meadow Elementary School student, will study history and psychology at Cornell University in the fall. Much like Mack, her choice of majors was influenced by a class at BHS — U.S. history, in her junior year.
Both seniors took 11 Advanced Placement courses. “I wanted to take classes that were going to be challenging, because I found that challenging classes were always the most rewarding when you look back on it,” McGowen said. “I’m most proud of the achievements I have from those classes.”
For Mack, the president of the Key Club and the National Honor Society, a demanding course load was always important. “I definitely didn’t want to take classes that wouldn’t be challenging,” he said. “[More challenging] classes are usually more interesting.”
The two were in the same A.P. government class last Oct. 8, when Principal Susan Knors’s voice came over the intercom, announcing the graduating class’s top 10 students. Mack and McGowen each said they expected to hear their name called and thought it would be somewhere near the top of the list, but to be named the top two was a thrill.
