Positive People in Pinecrest – Esther Cai

Positive People in Pinecrest - Esther Cai
Positive People in Pinecrest - Esther Cai
Esther Cai

This past summer, Palmetto High School senior Esther Cai volunteered at least twice a week at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

She’s visited Fairchild since she was a child and wanted to volunteer there because she’s interested in the environment.

As a volunteer, she transferred orchids into bioreactors tubes and monitored their progress.

“We would monitor everything from sunlight exposure, to nutrients, to how much water they took in,” she says. “Many of the orchid species at Fairchild are rare. We just grow as many as possible.”

Cai plans to continue to volunteer throughout her senior year. In fact, she’s excited to be part of the Palmetto group participating in the Growing Beyond Earth Project with Fairchild.

“We will be taking orchids from their lab into our own lab,” she says. “We’ll have our own system in one of our science sponsor’s room. We will have them until the end of the year.”

At the end of the year, they return them to Fairchild. This is the third year that Palmetto has been in the program but the first year she has been involved.

“They’ve just sprouted. We’ll get them when they are pretty small,” she says. “They won’t be blooming over the year.”

Cai also spend the summer immersed in politics as a volunteer for the Matt Haggman campaign for Congressional District 27.

She volunteered after a field organizer from the campaign spoke to her Advanced Placement U.S. History class.

“I thought it would be fun. I started in late June and worked up until the primary,” she says. “I actually have never known much about elections and politics beyond the presidential election which I think most people follow.”

She learned a lot about the process of running elections.

“The campaign emphasized going door to door, using social media and talking to people,” she says.

Until now, she thought she couldn’t be politically active since she’s not old enough to vote.

“Which is so wrong. Even without a vote, I can go out and get people who can vote to support a candidate,” she says.

Cai says she met many young people while working on the campaign.

“We just want to be involved in politics,” she says. “A lot of people don’t think young people vote. I think it’s starting to change.”

At Palmetto, Cai is on the board of Mu Alpha Theta, the math honor society. She competes in calculus but may compete in statistics at the state competition.

She’s working on logistics on the math competition that Palmetto’s will host in conjunction with Rickards High School from Tallahassee.

She’s vice president of activities for the National Science Honor Society. She was on the Envirothon team last year that won the regional competition and came in fourth at the state contest. This school year, Envirothon conflicts with Palmetto’s prom so she probably won’t be able to compete. Instead she may work on the Fairchild Challenge this year.

Cai tutors twice a week for Tutoring for Tomorrow and she is the treasurer of the Capstone Club. She started the Capstone program as a freshman, so she’s finished with her requirements but remains involved in the club. Her research project was about Environmental Research, which includes climate change and geo engineering.

Cai will likely study Environmental Science in college. She is considering applying early action to Yale or early decision to the University of Pennsylvania because they both have strong STEM programs. Other schools on her list include the University of Miami, New York University and the University of Southern California.

Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld


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