Baldwin High School's top students follow families’ leads

For Delainey Mack and Kamran Vakil, being at the academic top of Baldwin High School is a family tradition.

Mack followed in her older brother’s footsteps and became Baldwin’s valedictorian with a 120.87 weighted average. “I was glad that it was over with and I didn’t have to worry about it anymore,” she said of her reaction when she learned that she was first in her class.

Vakil’s two older brothers were first and third in their respective classes — he came in second this year. “So, I guess that makes me the average,” the salutatorian, who earned a 118.74 weighted average, joked in a Herald interview.

Both have been in the Baldwin School District since kindergarten. Last Friday, they bade farewell to the district they have known since childhood with speeches before parents, school administrators and the class of 2018.

Mack told her then classmates, “It’s been a long four years, but we made it.”

“Today seems surreal to me,” Vakil said during his speech, “since it marks the end of a chapter in all of our lives. Our class can finally start their careers in the real world.”

Asked what they would miss about Baldwin, the two were quick to say their friends.

“It’s hard to get new ones like it’s nothing,” Vakil said, which led Mack to add, “Especially since you’re moving to the other side of the country.” Vakil will attend the University of California at Berkeley to study mechanical engineering. Mack will be a little closer to home at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where she too will major in mechanical engineering.

They shared a love of physics during their time at Baldwin High. “It was a lot of fun,” Vakil said of the subject. But there was also a personal reason for his choice of a college major. His brothers studied computer science, he said. “I kind of wanted to break the mold there.”

Mack recalled some of the “crazy and fun” experiments conducted in physics classes, including a lesson on momentum that involved dropping pumpkins out of a window.

In other sessions, they watched cartoons, such as those featuring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, of Looney Tunes fame, and applied physics to various scenes.

“We applied it to the cartoons and found out just how wrong they were,” Mack, “and just how they really wouldn’t work in real life.”

Like most valedictorians and salutatorians, Mack and Vakil did not spend their high school years only hitting the books. Mack is a violin player, a competitive dancer and an artist.

Vakil was on the varsity tennis team, previously played soccer and is a violinist as well.

“I like to draw and paint,” Mack said. Her painting of the New York City skyline at sunrise was one of a few “calming murals” donated to Long Island Jewish Valley Stream Hospital by Baldwin students last year.

Asked what advice they would give eighth-graders entering high school in September, Mack and Vakil said to make as many friends as possible.

“Just become friends with everybody,” Vakil said. Mack added, “I would say develop a thick skin.”

Both encouraged their fellow graduates not to worry about what other people think of them. For Vakil, that meant telling students not to preoccupy themselves with the small mistakes they might make — because nobody else will care about them.

“They don’t think less of you for your small mistakes,” he said. “They don’t say, ‘Hey, remember that time you stubbed your toe on a parked car, or you tripped up the stairs or you made a bad joke?’ They don’t remember those unimportant moments, so why should you?”

Mack said that everyone should define and follow their own paths to success. “No one can definitively define your success, because it’s an individual thing,” she said. “Defining success is a personal matter.”