As Columbus St. Francis DeSales High School Student Council president Richael Saka prepared to graduate, she was feeling mixed emotions.
“It’s a bit bittersweet to be leaving Student Council,” she said, “but I know next year we’ll be in good hands.”
It might be sad to close this chapter, but Saka has a promising future. She will attend Harvard University in the fall on a full-ride scholarship. There, she plans to pursue dual studies in computer science and government. And she hopes to use her skills from student government on a larger scale.
Saka said she aspires to work at the United Nations in New York City. She has an extensive list of achievements indicating future success.
“I’m graduating summa cum laude this year, so that’s really exciting, getting to represent my class on the highest academic level, and I received the department medals for both computer science and mathematics,” she said.
“I’ve been really interested in STEM for the longest time, especially math and computer science, mainly sparked by one of my teachers, Ms. (Val) Sharritts, who really taught me that math is more than something cut and dry.
“It’s really an art as well. She really sparked my passion for loving mathematics, and also my (computer science) teacher, Mr. (Jack) Gedeon, who was just a mentor to me all throughout my journey in computer science and was also my supervisor for the Code Club.
“He’s been a big help for me, not only teaching me how to code, but also teaching me how to teach others how to code. I have a lot of teachers here that have been role models to me and have been really helpful in my academic journey.”
The Code Club is an organization that Saka started at DeSales for her classmates.
“I do a lot of things in my community specifically related to my passions in computer science or social justice,” she said. “I started the Code Club at St. Francis DeSales, so I teach and create the curriculums to help allow some of my peers to learn to code and program and also teaching them engineering fundamentals.
“I was able to help conduct some workshops for some elementary and middle school students, as well, so that they can learn how to code and program, especially young women who don’t often see themselves represented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).”
Saka is a National Merit Scholar. She entered the National Merit Scholarship Program based on her Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test score. High school students typically take the exam their junior year. The exam covers reading, writing and language and math.
She is one of approximately 50,000 students, of the 1.5 million high school students who took the exam, to qualify for the National Merit Scholarship program. She was recognized as a Commended Student.
Saka is a first-generation American. She was born in the U.S. to immigrant parents from Ghana. Saka said, from a young age, her parents instilled in her a work ethic.
Saka was awarded multiple scholarships for her academic achievements, leadership skills and service to her school and community that will fund her four years of college.
She won the national Amazon Future Engineer scholarship, which is a childhood-to-career program aimed at increasing access to computer science education for students from underserved and underrepresented communities. The scholarship includes a $40,000 award and a guaranteed internship with Amazon after Saka’s freshman year of college.
Saka won the Ron Brown Scholarship, which seeks to improve the lives of intellectually gifted, community- and public service-minded African American high school seniors by accelerating their progress into impactful leadership roles and opportunities.
“I was one of 50 around the country to be chosen for this $40,000 award,” she said. “We were flown out to Washington, D.C., in order to interview for the award. It’s just a really amazing community.
“And, I really love being a part of the scholarship community as well because it goes so far back, and it’s just a really good opportunity for me to network with other POC (people of color) students and people in all walks of life.”
Saka was also selected for the Equitable Excellence Scholarship. The $20,000 award seeks to empower students’ future plans so they can continue to have positive impacts in their community.
The scholarship recipients “exemplify the facets of the Equitable Excellence organization,” which she said means “working to make our community more equitable, striving for racial equality, socioeconomic equality in our cities.” The scholarship recipients are “people who strive to do more for our society, even going on to what we plan to study in college as well.”
Saka said she plans to continue her computer science and government studies, as well as involvement in extracurricular activities. She is also interested in continuing to learn Mandarin, the most widely spoken form of Chinese, which she studied in high school.
Saka competed in the international Chinese Bridge Chinese Proficiency Competition, which she was introduced to by her DeSales Mandarin teacher, Mengqi Wu.
“I’ve loved working with her,” Saka said. “She’s probably one of the most influential teachers that I’ve had in my life, and I am really grateful for her.”
The academic competition is designed for foreign students across the globe (outside of China) to demonstrate their mastery of the Chinese language. There were approximately 300 finalists for this past year’s competition.
“I was top 10 in the world finishing the Chinese Bridge competition, so as a prize, they gave me a scholarship to study abroad in either Taiwan or China anytime during my college years,” she said. “I’m really excited to be able to take on that adventure, as well, because I think learning foreign languages has definitely been such a big part of my life.”
Saka was awarded the permanent title “Ambassador for Chinese Language.” She will continue to work with the Chinese Bridge organization outside of school.
“The Chinese Bridge organization and the Confucius Institute are in charge of promoting learning Mandarin to foreign speakers around the world, so I get to be an ambassador of the language and work with the Chinese Bridge … to help promote more people to learn Mandarin,” she said.
She said that she hopes to work with Mandarin professors at Harvard to start a chapter on campus and to encourage her peers to enter the competition.
Saka is also learning to speak Korean. She was awarded a scholarship by the U.S. Department of State to take part in a language immersion program in South Korea this summer.
“There’s a cohort of 15 of us going to Korea and taking part in this fully funded language immersion program,” she said. “I’m really excited for that because I’ve really loved learning foreign languages for the longest time, and I think that will really help me on my journey to working in the United Nations and taking my skills to help tackle issues that are pressing the world on a global scale.”
Saka was a semifinalist for the 2023 class of Coca-Cola Scholars. The program selects high school seniors across the country for their academic excellence, leadership and service demonstrated in school and community activities.
Saka was also one of 4,000 high school seniors in the nation given an invitation from the U.S. Department of Education to apply for the U.S. Presidential Scholars program. The students are nominated based on their academic achievements and college admission test scores. The final scholar selection is chosen by the president of the United States.
Saka said most of the scholarships she applied for and won were listed on scholarship websites.
“Pretty much all of the scholarships that I’ve been applying for and have won have been from scholarship engines like scholarships.com, or Kaleidoscope or Scholarship America,” she said.
“I’ve made countless scholarship lists for some of my friends who have been asking me how they can apply to scholarships and fund their education as well. These are the three websites that I always recommend people search for scholarships that fit their demographics.”
Saka was named a recipient of the Ham4Progress award, which she found and applied for through a scholarship engine. The award honors 10 students in the U.S. who demonstrate academic achievement and commitment to social justice. Saka received a $3,500 cash prize, which was awarded by the cast of the Broadway musical “Hamilton” and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
“We had to write an essay about how we are working to promote social justice and racial equality in our schools and in our communities as well,” she said.
Saka said she worked to promote social justice in her school by being a part of the leadership team for SOBE (Student Organization for Black Empowerment). She said the student organization plans fundraisers and created a scholarship fund.
“We started a scholarship fund here at the school for POC students that are coming into DeSales, and we planned the first-ever Black History Month assembly last year,” she said. “We also planned another one this year for our second annual.”
Saka said SOBE invites speakers from throughout Columbus, including business owners, politicians and leaders “who set a good example for some of our students here and are a good role model for people to look up to.”
She also sought to promote social justice in her community by serving a term on the Columbus Youth Council during her junior year. The council represents the approximately 40,000 high school students in Columbus.
“There were 13-15 of us that were chosen all throughout the city by the Columbus City Council and the mayor,” she said. “So, that was really cool to be able to serve on the board for a year. We learned a lot about how city municipal governments work.
“We worked closely with the Columbus City Council, and we met every month at the City Hall. It’s really nice to be able to go there and meet different city leaders and just learn more about what us as a youth can do to make a change in our local cities and our schools as well.”
Saka demonstrated her leadership skills as a Bank of America Student Leader. Bank of America’s Student Leaders program prepares community-minded youth for success through leadership training and work experience. Saka was one of four students in central Ohio selected for the national program.
“Every major city that has a Bank of America headquarters, they also have three to four Student Leaders,” she said. “So, I had a paid internship at I Know I Can, which is a local nonprofit that works to help high schoolers at inner-city schools and public schools in Columbus to start the process of applying to college and pursuing higher education.
“Being able to see how working at a nonprofit works and be able to be a part of that network of other student leaders was definitely such a valuable experience for me.”
Saka also held a virtual summer internship at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation.
“We worked with clinical doctors and professors at Yale in order to create a program to encourage more POC and more youth to get interested in clinical research and also encouraging people to take part in clinical trials,” she said.
“So, that was very rewarding to see how the process works in doing research relating to social issues and also ways that youth can definitely make a change in terms of STEM and research. That was a really fun experience as well.”
For the past few years of high school, Saka interned at the University of Pittsburgh’s bioinformatics (using software for understanding biological data) center.
“I did a research project there also related to data science and public health, and I was able to present my research at a few competitions and also even published a paper with my mentor,” she said. “It’s still pending, but it will be published soon.”
Saka and her mentor, a Ph.D. candidate at the university, worked on a research paper for the American Medical Informatics Association, she said.
During her final high school semester, Saka interned at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
“I worked in their tech informatics center, so that was really cool to see how I could use technology to apply that in a government aspect, how technology is used in issues pressing our city and our state socially,” she said. “That’s something that sparked my interest in wanting to go into the intersection of computer science and government.
“I can use STEM and apply that to public policy and issues relating to public service as well. I think that’s definitely something really cool because I think people don’t necessarily think of STEM as things that you can apply to maybe non-technical problems.
“I think when people think ‘STEM’ they think of tech startups, like Google or Amazon, not necessarily like the U.S. government or the United Nations. So, I think that’s definitely something that really interests me.”
While interning at the state agency, Saka said, she learned how data can be used to predict future actions.
“You could solve a problem relating to how people apply for unemployment benefits, how computer science can be used to more efficiently streamline the process of people applying for unemployment benefits … and how the application process goes,” she said. “You can use computer science in pretty much any aspect of social issues or anything related to that.”
Saka hopes to apply this knowledge to a future career at the United Nations.
“They do have a few jobs (at the United Nations) related to tech policy and equitability and technology, especially in Third World countries, and how technology can be spread to those countries so that they can have access to the same assets that we do here,” she said. “I think I would definitely be interested in working on some of those projects.”
Reflecting on her many achievements, Saka traced her success back to her family roots.
“From a young age, I’ve been taught having discipline,” Saka said. “My mom, she came here with pretty much nothing, and she really taught me the importance of working hard and the importance of knowing that nothing is given. You really have to earn it. You have to work hard to deserve it.
“Not only excelling academically, but also pursuing extracurricular endeavors, not only inside of school, but outside of school as well, has been something that I think has shaped me into the person that I am today.
“And having a good support system at home with my sisters and my mom. They have definitely supported me every step of the way, and I’m really grateful for that. I think that’s definitely what has been my recipe to success.”
As she prepares to head to the East Coast for college, Saka said she will miss her friends from DeSales most.
“They’ve been my backbone throughout high school,” she said. “They’ve also kept me really humble and grounded for sure. I’m really grateful for my friend group and the friends that I’ve made at DeSales.”
