It’s an understatement to say that Lauren Nielson is driven, or that she’s worked hard in high school.
“It’s probably the hardest experience I’ll ever have to go through in my life,” said Nielson, who graduated Friday, June 15, as valedictorian at Edmonds-Woodway High School. “I’m sort of a perfectionist.”
Earning the No. 1 rank in her class at school, a goal Nielson set for herself as a freshman, has taken an immense amount of effort. Nielson is in the school’s rigorous International Baccalaureate, or IB, program and took six IB classes this year. She’s done four hours of homework per night for the past two years, she said.
That spirit of achievement extends beyond academics, though. Each week, Nielson spends hours at jump rope practice in Kirkland with a team that competes nationally and internationally.
Her team attends a yearly national competition that’s televised on the sports channel ESPN, and Nielson’s won national medals in categories like “triple-unders” and double Dutch. In a triple-under, she swoops the rope around three times with feet in the air before landing. In double Dutch, two ropes swing at once in opposite directions.
Nielson was able to combine her love of physics and jump rope, she said, in her IB Theory of Knowledge class, where she wrote a 4,000-word essay that crafted a physics equation for jump-ropers.
“It gives the optimum jumping height for anyone based on height and weight,” she said by phone June 11, after a four-and-a-half-hour jump rope practice in Kirkland. “The height you should jump to where your arms and legs would fatigue at the same time.”
In addition to jump rope, Nielson ran on the school’s cross country team until her senior year. She’s also tutored French and math and has been in the Frisbee club and math club.
She fits it all in by going to bed around midnight, and often getting up at 4:30 a.m. to finish homework, she said.
The summer between her junior and senior year, that intense lifestyle caught up with her.
“When my lifestyle became detrimental to my health, that was a wakeup call,” she said.
Nielson developed an iron deficiency and a stomach virus that causes ulcers. While competing at a jump rope competition in Toronto, Canada, she fainted.
“After that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do cross country my senior year,” she said. “I’m not invincible and I realized I do need to take care of myself.”
For that reason, Nielson plans to take a more relaxed approach to college than she did to high school.
“I’m pretty sure college will be easier than high school,” she said.
Nielson will attend Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in the fall. She plans to major in chemical engineering or environmental engineering, and has already set a modest career goal.
“My life-long goal is to reverse global warming,” she said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
