It’s 8 p.m. on a Thursday night and the Roslyn School District board of trustees are all gathered in the High School board room.
The room is usually packed with parents, teachers and often times students who will be recognized by the board for their accomplishments.
But there’s always a particular student who is always present at the meeting who sits with the board of trustees.
“So Nathan, are there any updates you want to share with the board,” Meryl Waxman Ben-Levy, president of the board says every meeting.
Yang, not looking down to any written notes, proceeds to share updates on activities Roslyn students have been up to.
Nathan Yang, 16, of Greenvale is a senior at Roslyn High, president of the Roslyn Organization of Class Councils and student representative to the Board of Education.
It is a meeting Nathan rarely misses.
“It’s nice that I get to interact with the board members and get pointers on leadership and team building and inform them what’s happening in the school,” Yang said.
In addition to serving as the students’ liaison to the school board, Yang leads the Roslyn Student Government, leads the Gay Student Alliance, serves an assistant section editor at the school newspaper and is a member of the varsity swim team.
“I did track but I wasn’t very good,” Yang said laughing.
What Yang is really good at, however, is swimming.
Yang is a member of the varsity swimming team, that includes with students from Port Washington, which has won numerous championships.
Yang said when he first started swimming he struggled in the pool and out of it.
The swimming team often has to be at the gymnasium by 5 a.m. for practice, making for long days.
Yang said he wanted to quit, but his parents encouraged him to stick with it.
“They’ve played a huge role in my life,” Yang said of his parents. “They encouraged me to stick with it.”
He said what he’ll most particularly miss when he graduates are his friends on the swimming team.
“There’s always a close-knit bond between the team and I and I’ll miss them,” Yang said.
Yang was also particularly thankful about one of his teachers, who he said has been most influential in his life.
He said Allyson Weseley, a research coordinator at Roslyn, had pushed him to pursue his interests.
“She has always been a supervisor to me and always expects the most out of her students,” Yang said. “The most important thing I’ve learned from her are the moral values I always apply in the real world.”
Yang said Wesely set him up with a medical research internship at Northwestern University over the summer in 2015.
He said he has already accepted an offer from Northwestern University in Chicago after his internship.
“I don’t know what my major will be yet,” Yang, who has many interests said. “But I’m looking to minor in something in the social sciences.”
He said his interests lie in social science research from the gender wage gap and compensation in the workplace to family dynamics.
Yang was was named a semifinalist in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search, the nation’s most prestigious research competition for high school students in January.
His project explored perceptions of single parents.
Having read that in general people have negative stereotypes about single parents, he said, he became interested in whether the gender of the parent and the reason they were single would influence perceptions.
He said he recruited more than 450 participants online and had them read a one-page vignette about a single working parent with one son.
He has an opportunity to be chosen as one of 40 finalists from among the 300 semifinalists nationwide.
Yang said his success at Roslyn High School shouldn’t be attributed to just him.
“Roslyn is a very great environment for any kid,” Yang said. “The teachers and faculty work very hard to motivate me and they want the students to do their best.”
