"I
think seeing him in the hospital atmosphere, seeing the strongest person I had
ever known get smaller physically, it was a hard experience, it was really
traumatizing on different levels," said Rezk, now an 18-year-old senior at High Tech High School in North Bergen. "But I think
that, in itself, it kind of invoked this feeling in me that I had a
responsibility to other people's dads, that if I had the ability to change the
way that other people's lives could be affected, then I should take advantage
of that. "I'm kind of honoring my
dad in that way."
Anna's father, Rezk Wanis Rezk, died at age
55.
The essay, along with other signs of Rezk's drive and
intelligence that included stellar grades with a schedule of virtually all
advanced placement and honors classes, helped win her a distinction unmatched
in the memory of High Tech High guidance officials—she was accepted into all
eight Ivy League colleges. Moreover,
every single one of them—Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn,
Princeton and Yale—offered her a full scholarship.
Anna hasn't decided just where she'll enroll in
September, though she is leaning toward Princeton University to stay
relatively close to her mother, Mervat Andrawes, or Brown University in
Providence, which offers an accelerated medical degree program. And Anna didn't do a bad job helping raise
her brothers: Peter, 20, now a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh; while her twin and High Tech classmate, John, will attend Princeton,
where he also received an offer of a full scholarship and will study
engineering.
"I'm kind of the bossy one," she said, adding
that her responsibilities included making sure her brothers had dinner.
"So I would tell them what to do."
It was John, the more outgoing of the twins, who spread
the word around school that his sister was in such high academic demand. "I'm not bragging!" John said,
beaming with pride at his sister's smarts during an interview in the office of
Assistant Principal Allyson Krone. "I just wanted to let people
know."
The school's longtime senior guidance counselor, Vincent
Nardiello, said he could not recall a student ever having been accepted to all
eight Ivies, as well as to the dozen "safety" schools where she also
applied. This is also a special year not
only for Anna and John, but for High Tech, which had a total of five students
accepted to Princeton among 272 graduating seniors, an unheard-of number for a
single school, Nardiello said. The other three are Mousy Lo of Jersey City,
Erica De Lacerda of North Bergen, and Muhammad Umar, another Class of '22 Ivy
Leaguer from Bayonne.
High Tech
High, which will move into a new building in September,
is a career-oriented magnet school whose 1,121 students are drawn from all over
Hudson County. Despite the traditional conception—or misconception—of technical
schools, Krone said High Tech prides itself on its rigorous academics. Each
student is enrolled in an academy, akin to a college major, which Krone and
Nardiello said may give High Tech graduates an advantage over their
counterparts.
Anna and her brothers were born in Brooklyn
after their parents immigrated to the United States from Egypt. The family soon
moved to Jersey City, where they joined the city's large Coptic Christian
community. Their father, an armored car driver, moved the family to Bayonne
when Anna and John were in 3rd grade, where their intellect was evident even
then
"They were, like, automatic superstars," said
Ghenwa Hassan, 17, of Bayonne, a friend of Anna's since elementary school, and
a classmate at High Tech, who will be headed to the Rutgers Ernest Mario School
of Pharmacy in September. "They
were the smartest kids in the class."
Hassan and others said Anna was not all academics. She
was a normal teen with a social life, a social conscience, and likes away from
school, including fiction writing, something Anna said she thought of pursuing
before medicine.
While her father's death did influence her decision on
just what it was she wanted to pursue, Anna said it was her dad and mom, who,
though not college grads, had instilled a joy of learning and a strong work
ethic in her.
"I guess I was always like that," said Anna,
who laughs easily and takes herself less seriously than her studies. "It's hard to predict whether I might
have been a slacker if he hadn't passed away."
For more on this story, please go to https://youtu.be/RpizIB-fQpQ
