Senior Jacob Spigelman is Miami Palmetto High’s Silver Knight nominee in the Business category. Spigelman has been volunteering at Friendship Circle since he was in seventh grade. For six years now, he and a friend visit a 12-year old boy each Friday.
“I’ve seen him grow up over the last six years,” Spigelman says.
They tailor the visits to what the child wants.
“He likes science experiments,” he says. “Other times we play sports basketball or soccer. He loves riding bikes.”
The boy especially likes science experiments that explode, so they did the one using soda and Mentos.
“It fizzles up and explodes,” Spigelman says, admitting that he also likes those kinds of experiments as well.
Because he expects to go away for college, Spigelman has looked into programs at similar programs at the universities he’s applied to.
“A lot of them combine special needs kids and college kids,” he says.
Spigelman also volunteers with Coconut Cares at the Barnyard.
“I was a tutor and basketball coach,” he says. “I went in the spring last year every other Monday. About 10 weeks total.”
He plans to start up again this coming spring. He took a break because fall is a busy time with school and college applications. He’s applied to Florida, Texas, Duke, Michigan, the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt.
He plans to major in business or economics. He’s currently a businessman and Palmetto’s Silver Knight nominee in the Business category.
Spigelman manages his own tutoring company. He offers tutoring services and advertises those services. He also trades sneakers.
“I trade online and at sneaker conventions,” he says. “I’ve traded hundreds of pairs.”
The business began after he stood in line for hours for a pair of shoes and realized he could make money if he sold them instead. He was in middle school at the time.
“There are some of these shoes that people go crazy for them because they’re worth so much,” he says.
He stopped standing in line, instead buying older ones, cleaning them up and selling them at a profit.
“People will buy these shoes. Most of the time, they are not buying them to wear on a daily basis,” he says. “They are more like collector’s items. These accumulate value over the years.”
He started buying them in bulk to get better deals and turn around at sell at a profit. He flipped 5-10 pairs of shoes a month. Shoes made by Nike, Adidas and Jordans are the most popular.
“They would give me whatever sizes or brands and out of ten boxes, I’d make a profit on all ten of them,” he says. “If you cleaned them up, you could make a profit off of them.”
He figured out a system for flipping the shoes quickly. He’s not selling as many now because he’s busier than ever at school now that he’s senior class president.
He’s working on changes to senior class events such as the senior picnic and the senior pep rally. He also wants to institute a new event to be held 100 days before the end of school.
Spigelman is vice president of the Jewish Student Union and vice president in charge of activities for the Science Honor Society. He’s participated in Envirothon for the last two years, and the Build It competition his sophomore year.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
