Maybe a teacher. Or maybe an education policy reformer. — Harvard Gazette

Andrew Zonneveld sees educating as a very powerful job on the planet.

“Medical doctors are nice. However docs are solely docs as a result of they’d nice academics,” mentioned the first-generation school scholar from North Carolina.

Zonneveld ’26, a authorities concentrator with a secondary in training research, is attending Harvard School on full monetary assist. Graduating debt-free means he can prioritize public service.

“I’d like to be a public faculty instructor for a number of years,” mentioned the Leverett Home resident.

“He talks an incredible deal about going again to North Carolina and serving to the faculties there,” mentioned his mother, Jennifer Eirich. “I believe it has loads to do with the robust connections he shaped with the academics he had as a child. However I assume I believe there’s one thing greater on the market for him. Perhaps he’ll go and alter the tutorial system for the entire nation. Perhaps he’ll go into politics.”

Zonneveld, who grew up on a army base and counts many servicemembers in his household, has been within the intersection of training and coverage from an early age. He recalled pitching an elementary faculty instructor on forming the varsity’s first scholar authorities.

“I gained president in third grade or fourth grade,” he mentioned. “In my speech, I promised the principal would kiss a pig if we raised sufficient cash via Field Tops — keep in mind these?”

Coming into Onslow Early School Excessive College — the place college students work towards their diplomas whereas incomes free credit from Coastal Carolina Neighborhood School — supplied Zonneveld together with his subsequent opening. He spent the summer time earlier than ninth grade drafting a structure for the scholar authorities affiliation he later helped launch on the newly opened public highschool.

“I may inform from the start how motivated he was,” remembered Hannah Padilla, a former steering counselor there. “Inside every week or two, he had come out of his shell and was simply unapologetically Andrew: a devoted scholar who knew precisely what he needed from life.”

The Class of 2022 valedictorian assumed he would attend North Carolina’s flagship public college. The college provided him a beneficiant scholarship. “But it surely was nonetheless going to price me 15 or 20 grand per yr,” Zonneveld mentioned.

Opening an acceptance letter from Harvard School was a tearful event — and a complete shock after making use of on a last-minute whim. “Not in 1,000,000 years did somebody from our county suppose one thing like this might occur,” Eirich mentioned.

The household had been involved about overlaying school prices, so the College’s provide got here as an enormous reduction.  “Monetary assist is basically the one motive I’m right here at Harvard,” he mentioned. “It’s the one manner I can afford it.”

The assist additionally means Zonneveld’s attentions are now not so splintered. He had skilled as a lifeguard in his early teenagers, and typically labored full-time at space swimming pools whereas attending highschool.

At Harvard, Zonneveld has continued educating aquatics on the Malkin Athletic Heart. However solely as a result of he nonetheless enjoys passing on his data. “I don’t must work loopy hours,” he mentioned.

Assist from Harvard additionally made different alternatives doable. Zonneveld was capable of full an internship final summer time at a analysis institute in Berlin with the assist of the Authorities Division. He additionally traveled to Thailand and Vietnam with Harvard Mannequin Congress to show excessive schoolers about coverage and public talking. Over spring break, he helped the group run a authorities simulation with teenagers in Brussels.

“Monetary assist didn’t simply carry me right here,” Zonneveld mentioned. “It allowed me to journey the world, to go house and see my household throughout breaks. It allowed me to have entry to alternatives I’d have by no means had anyplace else.”