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Miami Palmetto Senior James Cai won the Rensselaer Book Award at the end-of-the-year awards ceremony last spring. Cai has a passion for helping others through tutoring and writing study guides. Those study guides would help students taking Advanced Placement courses, including U.S. History, World History and European History.
During the summer, he and the current leader of the Miami Dialogue decided to combine their projects.
“We figured it would be more convenient for students if all their review/study guides were hosted on the same website,” he says. “Also, I’m helping with some of its (Miami Dialogue’s) issues.”
His plan was to have articles that presented a broad overview of each course and then have detailed articles on areas such as the U.S. labor movement.
“I don’t feel the College Board covers history that well,” he says. “I think the College Board class is very biased and doesn’t cover things completely. Especially for European history. I want to make kids aware of that. To let kids know not to accept everything they learn in class as actual fact.”
He says that one of things that he wants students to know about AP European History curriculum is that they don’t cover anarchism and a number of other important topics.
“You can’t selectively choose what to present in a history course; it has to teach everything” he says.
Cai is a member of Tutoring for Tomorrow, the student run tutoring organization. He also tutors for Mu Alpha Theta the math honor society. Plans call for going to Palmetto Middle School and tutoring math there, in a partnership with Mu Alpha Theta and Tutoring for Tomorrow.
He’s the vice president of activities for Mu Alpha Theta, so he will be setting up events for the math honor society.
He’s also in the Society Science Honor Society and competes in History Bowl. His History Bowl team won at the state competition and qualified for the National History Bowl in Arlington, VA.
His team did not qualify for the playoffs, so he went over to the Geography Bee and took the military test.
“I did pretty well, considering,” he says. “I think I got 99 points. The top people got around 120. I didn’t study at allWe found out the military test existed, a month before the competition. I was just doing that for fun.”
Cai enjoys participating in History Bowl.
“I don’t feel its representative of studying history, it’s mainly history trivia,” he says. “I mainly do it just for fun.”
He also likes science. He competes in the Science Bowl and Envirothon. His team qualified for the regional competition but so did another Palmetto team and only one team from each school can advance to the state competition and the national competition.
Another competition he entered was the International Science and Engineering Fair his sophomore and junior years. His projects dealt with predicting the recurrence risk of cancer.
Both projects included machine learning.
He qualified for the state competition both times but was disappointed that he was not selected to compete at that level.
Cai is a member of the Debate Club, working with the team to enhance his public speaking.
His college list includes the University of Florida, the University of Miami, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, the University of California Berkely, and the University of Michigan.
He wants to major in psychology.
“I want to do research, and clinical psychology,” he says. “I want to study it, I want to help people with all sorts of issues.”
This past summer, he took a six-week neuroscience class at UM.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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