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When Miami Palmetto High School senior Diego Espinosa arrived at Palmetto, he realized there could be a better way for new students to be welcomed so he started the Ambassador Initiative.
“All they had was an orientation day where the student council board would come,” he says. “I felt that something more was needed. Not just for freshmen but for people coming in from other places that were lost.”
His initiative paired up newcomers with people who knew the school well. The ambassadors even help the new students decide on what classes to take.
“The fact that you have so much choice with the classes, if you don’t know what to choose, you’re just blindly choosing,” he says.
Students who have siblings who have attended Palmetto already have an idea of which classes to take and which teachers are best, but kids who move to the area just before enrolling don’t have the benefit of knowing anything about classes and teachers.
He went through that situation when his family moved back to the U.S. after living in various countries around the world. He lived in Mexico, Dubai and Brazil before settling in Miami just before high school.
Now, Espinosa is president of the senior class and plans to help other students have a productive high school career.
In his time at Palmetto, he has tutored other students and helped a non-profit find grants to fund music lessons and an arts expo.
He tutors a friend’s sibling and he’s also a member of Tutoring for Tomorrow, the student run tutoring organization. While tutors are paid, half the fee is kept by the organization to use for charitable purposes.
“I tutor and I’m also on the board,” he says. “I created the website, so I’m the website manager and secretary. I’ve always liked tutoring. Most people only need help in math.”
He can tutor anything from fourth grade math to calculus.
Espinosa is a member of the Pinecrest City Music Project. He’s been working with PCMP on the grants team since his sophomore year.
“They give music lessons to kids who wouldn’t be able to afford it,” he says. “I go online and find grant money and pass them on to the grants team. I became very resourceful on the Internet.”
Last spring, Espinosa won the Outstanding Capstone Student at the end-of-the-year awards ceremony.
He had just finished the Advanced Placement Research class and wrote his thesis detailing the correlation between the SAT and income.
“Just because I wanted to see what advantages you could get,” he says. “There’s not that big a correlation. It found that everyone has equal opportunities.”
The Capstone students brainstormed their topics at the beginning of junior year and the project took about six months to complete.
Espinosa is a member of Key Club and has organized beach clean-ups and food drives for them. He’s a Science Bowl team member.
“It’s kind of like trivia or jeopardy, but always about science or math,” he says. “We went to the regional competition.”
His Envirothon team competed in the national competition this past summer. They swept the regional and state competitions.
Espinosa is a member of the Palmetto Model United Nations club.
“Basically, you represent a country, you go into a room, and work things out with other people,” he says.
His college applications include Florida State University, the University of Florida, Dartmouth, Georgia Tech and Northeastern.
He’s leaning toward engineering, anything from chemical engineering to nuclear engineering.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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