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National Merit Semifinalist

Many doors open to Cedar Creek’s Devika Dua
Wednesday, October 5, 2022
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Devika Dua has been a part of some rare groups of students throughout her school career.

In 2019 she was one of just six Louisianans to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. This summer she was one of two female students from the state hand-picked to attend the 75th American Legion Auxiliary Girls Nation session in Washington, D.C. Now the Cedar Creek School senior joins another elite selection of high schoolers as a National Merit Semifinalist.

Semifinalists for the prestigious scholarship competition are among the nation’s top scorers on the Prelimary SAT and represent less than 1% of the country’s high school seniors.

“We are just so proud of Devika and her tenacity, diligence and how well she has represented Cedar Creek School,” Principal Cindy Hampton said. “We are keeping our fingers crossed that we have a Finalist.”

Semifinalists apply to the next round of competition and are selected based on an essay, their academic record, contributions and leadership in school and community activities, and more.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that Dua’s portfolio is up to the challenge.

“I don’t know when she sleeps,” Hampton said.

In the past few years, Dua has:

• Held a remote internship with Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York

•Presented research at the national Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting

• Won a statewide election with the student business organization DECA

• Founded a Medical Club at Cedar Creek

• Become an AP Scholar with distinction

• Held another internship with the Cellular Neuroscience Lab at Louisiana Tech.

That’s not an exhaustive list. The Leader likely couldn’t contain such a collection in its pages.

With two parents serving as professors at Tech in STEM fields, Dua has strong passions for a wide variety of career options, including academia, the medical industry and national politics.

Naturally, the STEM interest is one of her longest-running fascinations, which was only heightened by her experiences with machine learning during the Brookhaven internship.

“Machine learning is kind of like artificial intelligence,” Dua said. “You’re basically training a programming model to do whatever you want.”

For example, as COVID-19 rampaged throughout the globe, researchers began to be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of research held in caches like the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19).

“Doctors and scientists and lab workers struggle with finding things that are important in (CORD-19),” she said. “So I created a model in which a scientist can input a question and certain keywords… and it finds out specific answers by analyzing those papers.”

The social and civil issues that arose around the same time as COVID-19 helped awaken a new science passion in Dua, this time on the political side.

“I started to become interested in certain human rights issues going on at the time,” she said. “There was Black Lives Matter, a lot of different things. I started to read a lot, engage with it. I loved talking to my parents about certain issues, and they said ‘maybe you should major in political science,’ and I said ‘no way, I still want to do STEM.’”

Then came the American Legion Auxiliary’s Girl State program, followed by Girls Nation. There Dua and 99 other students spent a week simulating their own mock government, complete with Congressional sessions, bills, debates and even election campaigns.

“I got to learn so much about the structure of government applicationwise,” she said. She got to meet and speak with U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, R-LA, whose background in both medicine and politics reflects Dua’s interests.

“He basically shows that that’s possible,” she said.

Dua’s interest in the medical field, meanwhile, stemmed from her AP Biology class, taught by Jeannie Reynolds.

“I used to hate biology,” Dua said. “I get into the class, and I just love it so much, the content we’re learning, and the way we get to apply it instead of just memorizing it.”

Of the many routes before her, Hampton knows Dua is prepared and able to meet any of them head-on, and she’s proud that Cedar Creek played a part in that preparation.

“We’ve done as much as we can to offer her the courses she needs to do whatever she wants to do in life and go to whatever university she wants to go to,” Hampton said. “Whatever she chooses to do, she gives 101%. She will not hold back. I have no doubt that she will do great things.”

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