On Valentine’s Day, Sydney Ginsburg was told that she would be Manhasset High School’s salutatorian.
“I was in my chemistry class, we were reviewing for a test, and a security guard came into my classroom for me,” she said. “So I had to leave class early, and I went to the principal’s office and Dr. Danka and my guidance counselor were standing there, and I knew I’d gotten salutatorian. I was so surprised. I did know I wasn’t getting valedictorian, because everyone knew that Liz would be getting it.”
Even though “Liz,” classmate Elizabeth Wu, had been told she was valedictorian the same day, she had internally known about her status for a long time, due to her GPA – a school record-breaking 4.65.
“I always knew it was going to be me since freshman year, ” Wu said. “They’d been telling me I had a record-breaking GPA.”
Ginsburg, of Plandome, and Wu, of the Shelter Rock area, both attended Shelter Rock Elementary School and have known each other for years. Both share passions for the sciences and humanities, and have great plans in mind for the future.
The journey to salutatorian was a long path for Ginsburg, in the most literal sense possible. She lives near the Long Island Rail Road’s Plandome station, and has ridden the rails to school for years, with nearly every member of her family taking a train in the morning.
“My dad takes it to go to work in the city, and my brother, twin sister and I will take separate trains in the morning, all to get to the Manhasset station,” Ginsburg said.
The senior cites math and history as her favorite subjects, with an equally great love of reading.
“I think it’s really hard for me to take anything I learn as isolated,” Ginsburg said. “For history I just find it to be so applicable for my daily life and I find myself thinking about things I learned in my social studies classes all the time, there’s no way for me to isolate the material that I learned there.”
On the field, Ginsburg participates in cross country running, as well as winter and spring track.
“The teams helped me develope a camaraderie with my teammates, and and from them and my coaches I’ve learned how to work and interact with people,” Ginsburg said.
Also outside the classroom, Ginsburg serves as student representative to Manhasset’s Board of Education, on the board of the Student Athlete Leadership Team, and as president of the Manhasset Community Coalition Against Substance Abuse’s Set Connect Club.
Wu says she doesn’t have a particular favorite class.
“I loved all my classes because all of my teachers have always been super supportive and really cultivating of my love for learning,” Wu said.
She does say being active in the school’s science research program was “a lot of fun,” and recalls John Gardner’s novel “Grendel” and William Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar” as some favorites to have read in English class.
“I love Marc Antony’s funeral oration, it’s very touching,” Wu said.
An active creative writer who loves reading poetry and prose, Wu also served as editor in chief of The Phoenix, the school’s yearly art and literature magazine. Usually handed out at the end of the year, the 2020 edition will be published online due to the coronavirus after students worked for weeks from their homes to complete it, she says.
Additionally, Wu serves as captain of the school’s Mathletes and Science Olympiad teams and is a member of the Spanish, English, science and math honor societies.
“I really enjoy these extracurriculars because I love sharing my own passion for these subjects with other people,” Wu said. “I love encouraging underclassmen to see the same beauty in creative writing or science that I do.”
As for their futures, Ginsburg’s include studying education policy and administration at the University of Chicago, where she was drawn in by the school’s culture.
“Something that’s important to me is finding people who care about learning as much as I do, and I wanted to be somewhere where that was the culture,” Ginsburg said. “And the motto at University of Chicago is that it’s ‘where fun goes to die!’ I think it’s so cool, because my whole life the whole ‘school is boring message’ has been projected anywhere, and so I thought, this is the place where people love studying, so this is perfect for me.”
Wu plans to attend Yale University, where she says the administration will forgo October break in favor of sending students home at Thanksgiving. She says she wants to pursue both a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science, in as-yet-undecided fields.
“I love both of these interests so much, and it does get overwhelming in the sense that there’s so much to learn and so much that I want to do,” Wu said. “But there’s a lot of overlap in between STEM and humanities, I can use my skills in humanities to improve my STEM abilities and I can use my STEM abilities like research and analysis to improve my abilities as a writer.”
Both women say that their success is due in part to excellent teachers in the district.
“Part of the reason I got this far is because I got teachers who were so understanding about workloads and created environments in class where everyone was comfortable and promoted learning and being engaged,” Ginsburg said. “I feel like I’ve had all the best teachers during my time here.”
Wu remembers specific teachers that affected her academic career, like English teachers Eric Shapiro and Leslie Skolnick.
“[Shapiro and Skolnick] really encouraged me to write more, and that helped me discover my love and talent for creative writing,” Wu said.
If Ginsburg could give advice to any students, she says, it would be to put the time in to study.
“I think there’s multiple paths to academic success, and for me it was important to put time in on my own studying,” Ginsburg said. “As important as it is to ask our questions when you know the right answer, it’s also so important to ask when you don’t know what’s going on. It’s scary for us to admit we don’t know the right answer, but it’s so important to always speak out, either for clarity or to progress a discussion.”
Wu’s advice would be to keep focus on what one loves.
“Something that’s important to keep in mind would be not to get caught up in the unfairness in life, because it would always exist and will always be there,” Wu said. “But you don’t want to get caught up in that and waste your energy. It’s better to focus on doing what you love and pursuing and persevering to achieve your goals, as long as you do it with integrity and responsibility.”
Manhasset has a tentative date planned for a socially distant ceremony on school grounds, to be held July 29. Ginsburg says that in the light of recent events, she has thought back on the true value of her education.
“I really think that my education has showed me how important it is to speak up about issues that are important, and I hope that we can all use our education to be the change we hope to see in the world,” Ginsburg said.
Wu also says that the “concerning amount of hate and violence” is “not even just about fear of the coronavirus during the pandemic.”
“At this point, there’s a lot of fear that exists that we have toward each other, between people,” Wu said. “And as someone who does creative writing and does a lot of research, a lot of my work is very collaborative and a lot of it relies on people trusting each other and working together. It’s just something I feel like everyone could keep in mind, that fear is really destructive, and keeping our minds open to one another and tolerant to one another is something we should always remember to do.”
