Sheila Joseph has been piling up academic awards ever since grade school, but her latest promises to be a life-changer.
The 2014 Charlotte Amalie High School valedictorian has a four-year scholarship to the prestigious Brown University, where she intends to study engineering and biology, eventually combining the two to become a biomedical engineer.
In that capacity, she said, she can make products that will help people. She wants to work in cancer research and possibly in genetics. And she’s already looking beyond college to further studies.
“I think I’m going to go to medical school afterward,” she said. “It’s probably going to happen. I’m 80 percent sure.”
An Ivy League institution established in 1764 in Providence, Rhode Island, Brown is one of the most expensive universities in the nation, making the full four-year scholarship extremely valuable. According to information available online, tuition runs $42,808 a year, compared with an average of out-of-state tuition cost of $13,364, and an average of $11,000 for in-state tuition.
Joseph is the first in her family to go to college. Born in Haiti, she was still a baby when her parents, Jean Joseph and Saint Anna Noel, moved with her and her older sister to St. Thomas.
“They wanted to find a better work opportunity,” Joseph said.
She’s never been back to Haiti – “not yet” at least – but she does speak a bit of Haitian Creole. She surprised classmates and family at graduation by using it to ask her parents to stand up and be recognized and to thank them.
Joseph is modest about her academic success, though she admits she is also competitive. She was just two points ahead of the salutatorian at CAHS. She was also the valedictorian when she left grade school at Emanuel Benjamin Oliver School and in junior high at Bertha C. Boschulte School.
She said she earned a number of library awards in her early years. One of her first major awards came in eighth grade when she won a notebook computer for her entry in a short story contest. She won first place in her division in the annual Laws of Life essay contest in 9th, 10th and 11th grades, and third place her senior year.
Her competency in language arts, however, is no match for her interest and her talent in the sciences. She earned first place awards in 9th grade and in 12th grade at the Science Fair, and a second place in 10th grade. What happened in 11th grade? She didn’t participate.
Her freshman science project was an illustration of the “butterfly effect.” Using spread sheets, she demonstrated how making one small change in the early stages of a sequence can radically alter the outcome. Her 10th grade project focused on radiation in the energy spectrum and in 12th grade she worked with denatured proteins, illustrating how heat and chemicals can alter proteins.
Joseph said “there’s no secret” to her academic prowess. “I’m not doing anything special … I just retain information very well.”
She said she reads the material carefully and sometimes says it out loud to help her understand and retain it. “I just repeat it over and over again until it sticks.”
She’s also dedicated to learning.
A lithe, pretty girl with a ready smile, she has attracted her share of admirers, but she says she isn’t interested in dating right now. “I don’t have time for that” she said. “I just want to keep focused on my stuff.”
She does have interests outside the classroom though. She spent three years with the CAHS band, playing clarinet, and envisions herself continuing to play for fun. She also enjoys singing. She said she viewed a video featuring activities at Brown and “the a cappella group sounded awesome, so I wanted to be a part of it.”
A number of people have helped Joseph along the way; she singled out two of the more recent educational influences on her: English teacher Elaine Jacobs and counselor Patricia Adams.
“They’ve been like my motivation. No matter what I’m doing, they’re always there for me,” she said.