A friendly race to the top for South High pair

For years, Kristen Wraith and Julia Poje expected that they were going to finish as the top two graduates in Valley Stream South High School’s class of 2010. The only question was, what order?

By a point – 106 to 105 – Wraith edged out Poje to be the school’s valedictorian this year. Wraith said the two would joke around about being rivals, but where one finished compared to the other never really mattered to them. Both are happy because they get to make speeches at the June 25 graduation ceremony.

“I’ve yet to decide what I’m going to say,” Wraith said, “but I’m excited about it.”

Next year, Wraith will attend Harvard University. She was deciding between there and Princeton, and when she visited Harvard, she knew that was the place she wanted to spend her next four years. “I was looking for a sign,” Wraith said, “and when I went, I fell in love with it.”

Wraith said she plans to study environmental science, a program that Harvard does well, she noted. In meeting the professors during a campus visit, Wraith said it was exactly what she was looking for.

Poje will be going to Colorado College on a scholarship. South’s salutatorian said that her scholarship stipulated that she major in biology, physics, math, geology or environmental science. “So bio it was,” she said.

Colorado College has a block schedule, she said, where a student will take one course for about 3 1/2 weeks straight. That will allow her to focus on one subject at a time and really study it in-depth. But most exciting for Poje will be the chance to travel. Some courses are meet, literally, on the other side of the world. For example, she noted, if she wanted to study Renaissance art she would spend a few weeks in Italy. Chilean Literature is taught in Chile.

“These types of opportunities weren’t possible anywhere else that I looked at,” she said.

Wraith, who attended Brooklyn Avenue School growing up, has taken a dozen Advanced Placement courses in high school and has a resumé full of extra-curricular activities. Among those are the National, Math, Athletic, Music, Language, Science and Art honor societies. This past year she was editor of the school newspaper, the Southern Bell, and has run cross-country and track.