At last week’s senior awards night, Samia Orva was announced as the 2026 valedictorian. The Classic customarily interviews both the valedictorian and salutatorian afterwards. Here’s our interview with Samia:

Q: What are your best pieces of advice for current underclassman and the incoming class?

Samia: This is very clichéd, but venture out of your comfort zone and actually approach people. Some of my strongest friendships, both in and out of school, came from spontaneous interactions. Every time I chose to take the jump and finally do that thing I’ve always wanted to but had been too scared to, I’ve never regretted it. 

Q: What is the best advice you have received that you’ve found helpful?

Samia: To always apply for that opportunity (be it an internship, a job, a scholarship, a club) that you think is too competitive or you think you’re under qualified for. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. 

Q: What is your best late-night-procrastination memory?

Samia: We had this comic book group project for AP Physics C where we had to depict a fight scene between two characters using and explaining physics principles. The assignment required us to use AI to generate the photos and this was a huge headache. My partner and I heavily procrastinated on the image generation aspect of this project, and we forgot to take into consideration that most chatbots have a limit to how many pictures you can generate each session. And so it was the night before the project was due, and we had like two good images in the comic from a decent AI bot before we ran out of free tries. We were scrambling to find other chatbots, but they were so bad. Some just refused to generate images of the characters due to copyright restrictions, even when we prompted it to change the character designs to be original. Others kept asking a bazillion questions before it actually generated any images. It was like talking to a wall. Copilot was the worst one.

Since we ended up using multiple different chatbots, the comic book images were super inconsistent. It was incredibly frustrating, but it just got to a point where the situation became funny. Some of the images generated were just absurd, with bootleg characters that didn’t resemble the characters we wanted at all or AI errors that made the images look very stupid. We had a good laugh that night.  

Q: What has been your favorite memory out of your four years at THHS?

Samia: It’s hard to pinpoint just one memory because there are so many moments to highlight. I would say the past two months of this year have been quite memorable. It’s been fun hopping from classroom to classroom throughout the day to meet up with my friends and play games since APs and final projects are all finished. Gathering in Mr. Amanna and Ms. Liu’s office during my frees to retreat from the loud and chaotic third floor hall has also been a highlight of this year.

My friends and I have had some of the most interesting conversations and game sessions in that room. Sometimes Mr. Amanna and Ms. Liu would join us too. It was nice to get everyone together and enjoy each other’s company.

Q: What college will you be attending? What are you most looking forward to for college?

Samia: I will be attending Princeton University in the fall. I’m really excited for the small town experience that comes with living on-campus and meeting people from all corners of the world. I’m also looking forward to getting involved with research at Princeton.

Q: What if any are your current career goals and/ or plans for the future? What do you plan on studying in college?

Samia: At the moment, I am considering pursuing biomedical research. I am majoring in chemical and biological engineering.

Q: Describe your high school experience compared to how it’s shown on TV.

Samia: My high school experience certainly wasn’t as eventful as depicted in the movies. Personally, I didn’t participate in productions like S!NG or FON, so I kind of missed out on that bonding experience that’s pretty central to Townsend’s identity.

However, I don’t have any regrets on how I did choose to lead these past four years. I think I found my community and formed friendships that will truly last a lifetime.