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Miami Palmetto High School rising senior Sunny You recently returned from the International Science and Engineering Fair sponsored by Regeneron, where he won Fourth Place in the Grand Award category, and he also won a special award from National Geographic.
Last year Sunny won Third Place Grand Award and a special award from U.S. AID, an agency of the federal government that tries to aid Third World Countries.
This is the third year that he has gone to the International Science Fair. His project is one that will be beneficial to everyone in a hurricane prone area.
“I’ve made a machine learning algorithm that can predict how strong a hurricane is, up to a day in advance,” he says.
Each year he has refined the project, adding new wrinkles to improve the viability of the app.
“One of my goals is to make it available to the general public.” he says.
The project was first judged at the South Florida Regional Science and Engineering Fair and then at the Florida State Science and Engineering Fair in Lakeland where it qualified for the International Fair.
Science and Math are Sunny’s top subjects. He’s willing to help others who might struggle in those subjects, so he created a community service project called STEM Excellence Tutoring.
“I do tutoring sessions for kids in STEM classes,” he says. “It’s going well so far.”
He charges $10 an hour for tutoring but the money is donated to a charity chosen by the student he’s tutoring. If the student doesn’t have a charity in mind, Sunny picks one, usually disaster relief efforts.
“I want to support as many things as I can,” he says.
He focuses on Advanced Placement Biology, but he also tutors in AP Chemistry, AP Physics, and AP Computer Science.
“Biology is the one a lot of people come to us for help,” he says.
He’s worked with approximately 20 students.
“Some come to me a lot for help but most of them are one-time students,” he says. “It’s usually around test time.”
He has two other students who help him with the tutoring. He hopes to continue next year and expand the service, which means he needs to find additional tutors.
In addition to his tutoring service, he also participates in the free tutoring sessions on Wednesdays after school sponsored by the honor societies, and other organizations.
This school year he was vice president for tutoring for both Mu Alpha Theta (math honor society) and the Science National Honor Society.
He competes in the American Mathematics competitions. Students who do well on that test move onto the American Mathematics National. They also compete in the U.S.A. Math Olympiad. Sunny has done well in the American Invitational Mathematics Exam.
His science competitions are Envirothon, Chemistry Olympiad (he’s qualified for the national contest twice), and the science fair. He’s competed in the History Bowl and his team qualified for the National competition.
He also plays boys doubles on the Palmetto badminton team.
This summer he’s attending the Youth Scholars Program at Florida State University, a research summer camp.
“Hopefully I can get some ideas from professors on how I can improve upon my project,” he says. “They have to do a math class, Probability and Simulation, a bio lab class and they also make you take a programming class. I’m going to do Python for intermediate/advanced students.”
Last summer he did a summer class at the University of Pennsylvania where he learned programming skills.
In college, he is considering majoring in computer science. His current list includes Cal Tech, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Yale.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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