Superintendent’s Spotlight: Rachel Ramos
Warwick Valley High School senior Rachel Ramos recently received the University at Albany’s Multicultural High School Scholar’s Award. The award recognizes upstate New York high school students for their outstanding academic performance and school and community involvement. She is the only Warwick Valley student to receive the award this year. In late September, she traveled to Albany with her mom and sister to accept the award during a ceremony with other recipients from across the state.
Rachel, who currently has a 4.0 GPA, is planning to major in nursing and possibly major or minor in statistics next year. She is applying to Binghamton University, University of Albany, University of Rhode Island, Rutgers University, the University of New Hampshire and West Virginia University. Her decision to pursue a career in nursing stems from her own life experiences as a patient in hospitals and doctors’ offices, and meeting compassionate nurses and doctors who inspired her strong desire to help others.
“I’ve met a lot of nurses. I feel like it’s a fun occupation,” Rachel said. “I’m also a very caring person and like to help people around me. It’s the type of person I am. My mom is also a medical coder, so she’s behind the scenes in the medical field. I just feel like all I want in life is to help people and feel like I have interaction with the world.”
Rachel has also met nursing students along the way and has gained inspiration about the field from them. She hopes to eventually combine her love for science and math to become a nurse anesthetist, which will require a doctorate degree and nursing experience.
“I’ve always had a strong suit for science, specifically biology, and I feel like that correlates to the nursing field a lot and well. To be more specific, I want to do anesthesiology, which comes with a lot of numbers, which is why I want to major in statistics as well. I am taking statistics class right now and I really enjoy it. But, mostly, I want to help people. That’s what my point of view or perspective is.”
Through a lot of research, she also considered other medical areas such as becoming a medical assistant, a pediatrician or a pharmacist, before landing on the nursing and anesthesiology path.
Among her current classes, Rachel is taking college precalculus, AP environmental science and college statistics. She is a member of the National Honor Society and the GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) Club. She started volunteering for her service hours, helping out at the Warwick Valley Humane Society, the local food bank, as well as assisting with teaching students in her Catholic Sunday school. Her work with the humane society includes helping socialize cats with humans.
“I usually spend like an hour a week at the humane society,” she said. “There’s different rooms with different ages of cats and we’re just kind of like socializing them, making sure they’re interacting with humans and finding a safe space with humans, because some of them come from the street and haven’t had the best relationship with humans.”
Socializing cats can be a little bit of a process. “We give them treats, play with them, and pet them, if they’re comfortable with that,” she said. “I’ve been doing it ever since freshman year. I love animals. I have two dogs.”
She plans to continue her volunteer work until she goes away to college.
Rachel was surprised when she found out she won the Multicultural High School Scholar’s Award, and she was proud to attend the ceremony and represent Warwick.
“I was very shocked when I got the e-mail from my guidance counselor,” she said. “I wouldn’t say I won a lot of awards, so I was very surprised and like the fact that it fit how I am as a person because the award is intended for diverse individuals.”
