Test after test, assignment after assignment; studying and learning never ends. He spent thousands of hours studying to just be the best, keeping up his GPA whilst managing many different clubs. He kept a jam-packed week of debate club, robotics, student council and AP classes.

A valedictorian is a title of success given to those with the highest academic achievement amongst all other students. Senior Slava Andrianov, the senior class president and current valedictorian is having all of his hard work pay off as his senior year comes to an end. 

“I’m involved in a lot of different activities,” Andrianov said. “I started to explore a lot of different interests in high school, which is kinda two different sides. I have my more favored side STEM with computer science and robotics, but then I still have my humanity-favored side with student council and debate. I try to explore both and see what I like and which one interests me more, but I know I’ll end up choosing STEM, even though I still value my humanities favored activities.” 

Andrianov participates in robotics, student council, debate and many different AP classes. As such, the battle for maintaining Valedictorian status isn’t based on time management, but is impossible without it.

“A lot of high school has been managing my time effectively because something like robotics during build season we are working up to 15 hours a week, and of course other clubs obligations will present scheduling conflicts,” said Andrianov. “One conflict I had was between robotics and debate where I had important competitions for both on the same day and it makes me feel good as I feel like I’m really learning a lot.”

Class rank at school is competitive and requires many hundreds of hours of out-of-school work to maintain high grades in advanced classes. Despite the high stress and competitive aspect, many student’s experience Andrianov found a way for everyone to progress together.

“I was very fortunate to be friends with the students who have high grades in my class, so it was never really an atmosphere where I felt like I had to be rude or whatever in fact it was very collaborative as we all shared similar goals,” said Andrianov. “It’s a nice environment overall, even with some competition, but at the end of the day we all worked together to achieve the same goals as my friends with competitive grades would always come first before any numbers.” 

In addition to working towards common goals, Andrianov participates in different clubs that take up large amounts of time. For example, Robotics can take up to 15 hours a week alone, but he said it’s very rewarding despite the sacrifice of time.

“In robotics, were always actively building something and just seeing it come to life is always just so fascinating, like watching it come to life after spending months building it is just the most rewarding thing ever,” Andrianov said. “Something else that felt amazing was getting our robot to autonomously shoot a ball in the air into a target because it was a true combination of hard work building the robot and also just learning how to make it work autonomously.”

Voted in by his peers, Andrianov is the senior student council president. Student council is responsible for many of the student events, such as prom, homecoming and senior class events.

“Student council has been a lot of fun because it’s an atmosphere of being able to do it with my friends, but it’s also nice because we can see an impact that we’re having,” Andrianov said. “If we have a project we want to do, we can go ahead and put it into action. That feels good as I’m doing something productive and I get to do it with my friends, but it still benefits the community.”

Throughout high school, Andrianov has been working hard to maintain high grades with the goal of higher education. He not only achieved his goal, but is the highest-ranked student out of 500 other students in academic achievement whilst also maintaining multiple clubs.

“Overall, I’d say that high school wasn’t too bad,” said Andrianov. “I definitely like it more than middle school, as I have more freedom in picking my classes. There’s a wide range of activities that I can still involve myself in because of the overall system of scheduling and it’s like the first taste where you can more or else affect what you want to do.”

Now, he can further explore these activities at University of Texas at Austin where he will major in computer science. The UT honors program he will be attending was called Texas Computer Science and Business Honors program.

“I got into UT originally in December for computer science, and me and my mom were very happy,” said Andrianov. “I was also very happy to be invited to dinner with all the people I would be going to school with.”