Interviewees: High School Students
Marina Affo
Marina is a junior at Lewiston High School. She has lived in Lewiston since she was 5 years old, when her family moved to Maine from Togo in Africa. Marina is an honor student and serves as the president of the junior class at Lewiston High. She aspires to become a journalist.
Victoria Morelli
Victoria is a student in her junior year at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics. Although she is not yet certain what she will pursue in college, she is very interested in food research.
Nathan Faessler
Nathan is a senior at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone, ME. Last year Nathan and a friend won first place in the DeepCwind Consortium’s “Windstorm Challenge,” in which students from schools across Maine were asked to design a floating platform for a scale model wind turbine. The prize for winning the challenge was a $20,000 scholarship to UMO, where he plans to study wind power.
Arsen Tufankjian
Arsen grew up in Portland and is currently a senior at Portland High School. After high school, Arsen plans to study computer science and interactive media game development so that he can pursue his dream of becoming a video game developer.
Abdullahi Sharif-Isaack
Abdullahi (“Boots”) grew up in Somalia and moved to the U.S. with his family in 2005. His family originally lived in Virginia when they arrived in the U.S., but later moved to Maine. Abdullahi attended Deering High School, graduating in 2011. He is looking forward to college and plans to study computer science at SMCC.
Mahad Warsame
Mahad Warsame was born in Kenya but spent much of his childhood in Somalia before moving to the U.S. at the age of 6. His experience as an ELL student has been challenging, but he persevered and graduated from Portland’s Deering High School in 2011. Beginning this fall, Mahad will be enrolled at Benjamin Franklin Institute in Boston, where he hopes to study architecture.