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Mostly Cloudy Meet Oceanside High School class of 2020's valedictorian and salutatorian
Lucy Lebowitz, the valedictorian of Oceanside High School’s class of 2020, earned top of her class with a 105.76 overall GPA. She’ll head to Brown University in the fall.
Throughout Lucy’s time at OHS, she was devoted to art classes and earned several awards for her artwork. While excelling in academics, she also participated in several clubs and activities.
Lucy has played an active role in student government since her freshman year. She also used her art skills to beautify the school with new paint jobs, posters, banners and a mural.
Most memorably, she said, she was Battle of the Classes Art Captain every year of her high school career. She helped lead her grade to victory in the semester-long arts competition for the past three years.
“It taught me a lot about delegating my time and working ceaselessly for a beautiful end result,” she said, “but most importantly, it showed me how to stay hopeful and optimistic in the face of adversity and doubt. We were the underdogs but I never let that stop me from working hard.”
Lucy was president of Mu Alpha Theta Math Honor Society, vice president of National Honor Society, historian of the Ethics Bowl and a member of the lacrosse team.
Outside of school, Lucy volunteered at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside. At the hospital, she’d greet people at the entrances, direct them to the correct floors and run other errands.
Lucy has not fully decided what she’d like to study at Brown, but she is thinking about a career in public health. She also plans to take art courses at Rhode Island School of Design.
“It feels surreal to be going to such an amazing school,” she said. “I actually just received a letter in the mail from my eighth grade self where I said. ‘Brown is my dream school and hopefully we're going there,’ so it's such an amazing feeling to have gotten into my dream school, to know the person I am today would've made my middle school self proud.”
Rita Bogdanova-Shapkina, Oceanside High School’s salutatorian for the class of 2020, will attend Harvard University in the fall.
“I'm beyond excited to take advantage of this amazing opportunity,” she said. “I can't wait to discover my passions through extracurricular [activities] and classes and meet fantastic people.”
Rita would like to enter a science-related field and is unsure what exactly she will major in. For the past two summers, she was a research intern at Columbia University Medical School’s Ferrando Lab, performing research on acute lymphoblastic leukemia treatment.
At Oceanside High School, Rita cofounded and was vice president of Science Olympiad, which competed in Division C tournaments.
She also participated in Amnesty International Club, varsity tennis, Sider Press and law club/mock trial. She was a New York State Mock Trial quarterfinalist in 2017. That same year, she was also part of the undefeated varsity tennis team in the regular season and earned first place in the school science research fair.
In addition, one of Rita’s local newspaper articles, “A Call for More Safety Guards” was featured in the Herald in 2017. She was nominated for a LIU Post Journalism Award the next year.
One of Rita’s most formative high school experiences, she said, was becoming an officer of World Interest Club, which she has been involved in since 2016. The club is a nationally ranked Model UN team, most recently number 17 on bestdelegate.com. During Model UN events, she won outstanding delegate on numerous occasions.
“It taught me a lot about leadership and responsibility” she said, “namely, that the hallmark of a good leader is always putting the organization and its members first, ahead of yourself, and that it's an honor to be entrusted with the well-being of an organization.”
