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04/10/2024 08:30 AMEast Haven High School (EHHS) junior Aedan Connors was recently announced as a Student of the Month by the East Haven Rotary Club—a recognition that came as a genuine surprise to him.
The selection of schools that Aedan is eyeing for possible enrollment next year speaks volumes of his achievements, and that just might have been what caught the attention of the Rotary Club. All of those schools are among the best in the country, including some in the Ivy League.
“I'm looking at a couple of the Ivys, like Yale and Brown, but also some schools more towards the middle of the country like Georgetown in Washington, D.C., but also like Emory in Georgia,” Aedan says.
Aedan has been meeting with his guidance counselors to begin the college application process, bringing about a mixture of nervousness and excitement as he thinks about personal essay topics and “bolstering up my own application.”
“The nerves are definitely there,” Aedan says. “It’s kind of getting real that I'm gonna be having to tackle this big momentous task, and it's gonna be a big part of my life. So, I want to get it right. But the excitement is also there because I really know that I'm going to be able to find a place that suits me.”
Aedan is a very involved person both in and out of EHHS. At the high school, Aedan is a member of the boys’ tennis and swimming teams, as well as the Math League and the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) club. Outside of high school, Aedan is a competitive swimmer with the Bulldog Swimming club at Yale University, where he also helps younger swimmers.
“We’re able to actually work with the younger swimmers on improving both their personalities by teaching them good leadership qualities and how to be great people, but we're also helping them with their swimming,” Aedan says.
Aedan’s lifelong participation in swimming is also a guiding light for his selection of higher-education institutions.
“A lot of these schools both have the swimming programs that are really good and also have academic rigor that I'm looking for in colleges,” he says.
Besides athletics, Aedan leverages his knowledge in mathematics to students in East Haven and all around the country. Specifically in the case of the latter, this is achieved by tutoring on the Schoolhouse platform with Khan Academy, helping struggling math students with some particularly complex problems. Aedan remembers working with one student that was falling behind his online peers.
“I stayed and gave him a little bit of extra help on one of the days, and we covered things like figuring out quadratic equation-type questions that use like the discriminant,” Aedan says. “As we continued working, he persevered, and we started doing the extra one-on-one stuff. Eventually he got it, and it was just really awesome to see it because it reminded me of when I was first learning stuff like that.”
Overall, Aedan definitely has a passion for helping others.
“I like to try to instill the excitement that I have surrounding different activities in other people,” he says. “I tried to hopefully help kids in the East Haven area, along with kids around the country, with their SATs math stuff, so hopefully they can get a little better at it and find enjoyment in it just like I do.”
Aedan’s impact in the East Haven community also touches upon his time with the FBLA club, including raising money for cancer research.
As far as what his major in college is going to be, Aedan says that “it’s still a little cloudy for me.”
Aedan has considered business, finance, and accounting, but he’s recently become more interested in the sciences, especially biology. While the latter field appears to be the outlier, there is still the potential to take the mathematics of the first three subjects and combine all of them into one career that could suit Aedan, who knows all about water through his competitive swimming efforts and the experience of having grown up on the beach.
“I'm really digging the sciences right now, but I also really enjoyed the math, so maybe something that’s a science/math engineering [career] like biomedical engineering that can also relate to aquatic animals,” says Aedan. “That would be something really interesting.”