‘I Have the Chance to Make Something Big of Myself’

Name: Qaren Quartey

Age: 15

School: Watkins Mill High School

Accomplishment: Recently named a finalist for the National Achievement Scholarship for exceptional African-American students.

Key to Awesomeness: Relentless optimism.

It’s rare these days that Qaren Quartey gets to bed before midnight.

After her usual hours of homework comes the seemingly endless deluge of scholarship applications and essays in the hopes of finding a way to pay for college next year.

With her brother and sister already in school, everything is riding on it.

The National Achievement Scholarship is only the tip of her scholarship iceberg. She is also one of a handful of Watkins Mill seniors trying to become a Gates Millennium Scholar, which brings with it a full-ride scholarship for a mere 1,000 students nationwide. (Remarkably, Watkins Mill had two winners in 2009 and one in 2008.) She’s applied to a slew more, and Watkins Mill’s college counselor, Debbie Prochnow, has kept them coming.

“Right now I’m doing like five more,” she said. “And every month, new ones come out, so it’s been crazy.”

Not that she isn’t already used to a busy lifestyle, what with the demands of Watkins Mill’s International Baccalaureate program. And the time she spends tutoring other Watkins Mill students. And her four years on Watkins Mill’s volleyball team. And her weekend work with the Delta Sigma Theta service sorority.

“I’m always here doing something,” she said.

All this at the ripe old age of 15.

Qaren’s prodigious smarts took over soon after her family moved to Montgomery County from Ghana when she was 5. She skipped kindergarten, then later, 5th grade.

But she’s as big-hearted as she is brilliant, and quick to count her blessings—an unfailingly upbeat outlook wrought from watching her mentally ill mother succumb over the years to hallucinations and paranoia.

“Losing the mom I had always known, it really taught me to appreciate the good times you have while they’re here,” Qaren said. "She’s still my mother and I still love her, but it teaches me that I need to just live in the moment. Don’t take for granted what you have now. It taught me also the importance of family and support.”

That support comes in heavy doses from her brother and sister, who believe in Qaren to the utmost—“maybe even more than I do,” she said. From her father she sees proof of how far people can come; from her mother, how easily it can all fall apart.

“My dad, he always reminds me that his parents were illiterate, that he came from the ghettos of Accra, so don’t waste the opportunity. There are so many people back in Ghana who think America is the greatest thing, that the streets are paved in gold. They may not be, but there’s great opportunity here that I really want to take advantage of,” Qaren said. “I have the chance to make something big of myself, so that my children can do well and not have to worry about money like I do. There’s always financial issues, and I really just want to be stable. That’s what motivates me: I know education is the only sure way you can attain success.”

The only question is where. Three schools have already told her yes: University of Maryland-College Park, University of Maryland-Baltimore County and College of Notre Dame.

Those are her safeties.

Eight other schools will give her their yea or nay in the coming weeks, including her favorites—Dartmouth and Princeton—and her father’s favorite, Harvard.

Wherever she matriculates in the fall, this is the path she envisions: A major in biology on a pre-med track, on to Johns Hopkins for her post-grad work, then back to Montgomery County to be a pediatrician.

“I actually want to live here. People think I’m weird, but it’s a great place,” she said. “Maryland’s perfect, I think—not California or Florida or some cold place. Maryland’s like a little America.”