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Miami Palmetto High School senior Nicolas Garavito is president of Palmetto’s Student Council. Last year he was president of the Class of ‘22.
One of his goals this year is to make school sponsored events enjoyable. And he wants students to have a real high school experience, after two years of COVID-19 related lockdowns and on-line classes.
“For the class of 2024, they don’t really know what high school is like,” he says.
One of the major events Garavito wanted to work on this year was Homecoming. This year’s theme was “hocoween.”
“Overall, the experience was a great success and I felt very proud to have helped in seeing my fellow classmates share similar interests to mine in helping the school,” he says.
Over the years, Garavito has spent a lot of his time playing competitive soccer. He currently is captain for Miami Rush Kendall in the MLS Next league, the highest league of youth soccer in the country.
He practices four times a week and has games all over Florida as well as out-of-state matches in Atlanta as well as North Carolina.
“Last year my team qualified to the national playoffs among the top 32 teams in the nation and competed in the highly-known Dallas Cup Tournament,” Garavito says. “We were able to play against some of the top professional academy teams in the nation and I enjoyed and continue to enjoy playing a lot.”
Although he’s not Jewish, Garavito was a camp counselor at the Bet Shira Congregation, dealing with children from two to four years old. His friend told him about the camp and they volunteered there together and had a great time.
“I was in charge of watching over them and organizing activities,” he says. “I enjoyed the time a lot.”
At Palmetto, Garavito is a Peer Health Educator, going into ninth grade World History classrooms to teach freshmen about a variety of health issues, including HIV/AIDS and mental health.
“I think it’s a really helpful program,” he says. “My mother had breast cancer when I was younger. It’s really helpful for those students to have a connection with someone who is older than them. It created a safe environment. I thought it created a bond between each of the students that were in the classroom who are going through similar experiences.”
Last year the classes were both online and in-person. This school year the sessions are face-to-face.
Garavito is a member of the Finance Club, the Spanish National Honor Society, the National Honor Society and Mu Alpha Theta.
The summer before junior year, he participated in a program called LEAD. The first two weeks were at Duke University and the second two weeks the students took a real estate course at the University of Miami.
To complete the program, they had to invent something that could solve a social problem in today’s society.
He and the team of six created Opportuniteen, a website where students could subscribe and it would connect them to local employers.
Garavito’s team was chosen as the most innovative, although they did not win first place.
He continued to participate in LEAD this past summer.
“They had a jump start program partnered with Morgan Stanley,” he says. “At the end we had another Capstone project.”
He did an internship at the Elite Sales Real Estate Group the summer before his junior year.
Garavito has applied to the University of Pennsylvania, University of Miami, Columbia, Harvard and Cornell. He plans to major in finance.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
