16-year-old Aditya Garg, a junior at the Early College of Guilford, is one of only two students in North Carolina, and 104 in the United States, who will attend the 51st annual United States Senate Youth Program. It's a prestigious program, and, as Garg says, being selected is a long process. "There's an application, couple with an essay and presentation, and of course, we have to have a recommendation," he explains. "And so about late October or November, I got a call saying I was one of four to six finalists for the program. We were called for an interview with five or six people, we had to give a live presentation, and there was a written test."
He will spend a week attending meetings and briefings with Senators and Congressional staff, the president, a justice of the Supreme Court, and ambassador to the United States, and top members of the national media.
Garg says he's long known that he was destined for public service. "I really got interested in public service a couple of years ago when I joined my Boy Scout troop, and I was really inspired by the selfless service that our mentors and counselors gave to the troop. A lot of these adults work many hours a week, just so that we can have a positive scouting experience, and just sort of watching them as they gave back to the troop was really inspiring."
But Aditya Garg isn't waiting until some indeterminate time in the future to make contributions. He has started a peer-mentoring program called EducateUS.
"It was a program that I started during my sophomore year last year," he explained, "and initially we began just tutoring at Kernodle Middle School, but this year we also started tutoring at Northwest, and we have a group of about 20-odd people going twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays for about an hour, tutoring in math and science."
Aditya Garg also serves as the student body vice president, and is his school's learning ambassador.
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