Henry Seitz, 11, is a hardworking student who has many activities, mainly in the arts. Seitz is involved in theater and participated in many shows at the high school. They also dedicate time to music by being in Madrigals, the Youth Chorus of Kansas City, and playing piano outside of school.
In addition to Seitz’s passion in the arts, they are also studious. Seitz is currently enrolled in AP Lang, AP Chem, AP U.S. History, trigonometry, and Spanish III in addition to learning Japanese in their own time. Courses like these often challenge students.
“I use most of my spare time in my other classes and at home to do any assignments and homework. It’s less outside of class work than I thought it would be. It’s mostly just trigonometry, and every so often APUSH has a huge assignment. My goal is to get into MIT, so I figured I would take as many hard classes as I could take, and it would be good to prepare me for that,” Seitz said.
Seitz has goals to become a videogame designer after taking into account their interests and how they can work together. Seitz didn’t have a specific college in mind until last spring when they took a trip to Boston to attend a video game convention. During this trip they got to see the opportunities that MIT has to offer and decided to work towards that goal.
“I think a lot about what I’m going to do later in life, and I’ve always enjoyed storytelling stuff, and I also like video games and computer things. So I kind of experimented around and I decided that I really enjoyed creating video games and writing stories that can create experiences for people,” Seitz said.
Seitz plans to take calculus, digital narratives, and Japanese at Johnson County Community College during their senior year. They also plan to take physics to receive the Kansas Scholar Award, as well as taking AP Government and AP Music Theory to further their knowledge and check off some prerequisites in college.
“[I would tell my future self to] have a good, safe group of friends that you can be yourself with. I think that is one of the most important things you can have in life,” Seitz said.
