Palmetto High School senior Alia Hutton is a top student and she is engaged in the community. Her school and community achievements were recognized this past year when she was awarded the Harvard Book Award, an award given out by the alumni of Harvard University.
At Palmetto, she’s president of the Science National Honor Society. This year she hopes to bring in speakers to talk about relevant topics.
Members of the honor society often compete in a variety of science competitions. She usually competes in Envirothon.
“For the past two years I’ve been to the states,” she says. “I won aquatics one year and we won fourth place over all the next year (at states).”
She’s also participated in the Science Bowl and the Astronaut Challenge.
This year she plans on take part in the Fairchild Challenge to make up for not doing the Science Bowl. She says she’ll go to the Envirothon regional competition as an alternate.
Hutton is vice president of Mu Alpha Theta and competes in calculus for the club. She’s also the environmental outreach chair for the Student Council. That position also requires her to be a part of the Climate Leadership Engagement Opportunity (CLEO). She’s also the director of foreign outreach for Interact and a member of Tutoring for Tomorrow.
Hutton has volunteered at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital for three years. She’s worked in both the emergency room and the Oncology unit.
In her time there, she’s helped restructure the role of the child life volunteers who work in the emergency room. Because she’s been such a good volunteer, hospital officials asked what they could do to make the volunteering more interactive and productive.
“When I started, all we did was clean toys and distribute them,” she says. “I tried to make it more patient interactive for the volunteers. So, it’s less boring for the volunteers and less boring for the patients alike.”
These days, the volunteers not only distribute the toys, but they stop and play with the children who are waiting in the ER.
“Play is the primary distraction,” she says.
She’s also allowed to sit in for minor procedures to help distract the child. Hutton only does that when she’s in the presence of a supervisor.
“It was pretty much only me (sitting in on the procedures). I was able to keep the kids calm,” she says.
Last summer, she interned with Women for Tomorrow at their Doral offices.
“I conducted a project searching for alumni from the year they started,” she says. “They were celebrating their twentieth anniversary and they wanted to highlight their successful alumni.”
She directly contacted 50-60 percent of the alumni and found the contact information for the rest of them.
She learned a lot about business and non-profits in her time there.
“I was able to listen to important calls for the CEO and see what goes on behind the scene in the non-profit community,” she says.
Last year Hutton won the Emperor Science Award, a national recognition program for tenth and eleventh grade students who have strong scientific interests. That enabled her to do research at the University of Miami Sylvester Cancer Center in a molecular lab.
She researched PCR cloning and wrote a paper that was due at the end of the September.
“It was an interesting experience,” she says. “I was preparing the PCR product. It took hours. I’d spend my day doing one of those.
I kind of perfected what I was doing.”
The experience is valuable because Hutton wants to become a doctor. Her planned major is biomedical engineering.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
