Campbell resident Anna Yang, a senior at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, has been selected as one of 150 Coke Scholars by Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation, which will contribute $20,000 to her education at Stanford University. The only honoree from Santa Clara County, Anna was chosen from among more than 91,000 applicants.
As part of her application, Anna selected Notre Dame physics teacher Olena Petrova as her Educator of Distinction. The school honored Anna and Petrova at its annual Senior Recognition Night on Thursday, May 25.
The Coke Scholars Award honors students who combine academic achievement with community service. The honor caps an array of achievements for Anna throughout her high school career in both science and literature. “I feel like everyone is born to love humanities and science, and it’s really just the world that pushes them to choose,” Anna said in a statement.
Anna is the current Youth Poet Laureate for Santa Clara County. She was a Top 10 finisher in the New York Times’ Profile Contest, and the newspaper published her feature on UC Davis mechanical engineering student and lead student farmer Jesus Trujillo.
A beekeeper for five years, Anna learned that Colony Collapse Disorder often occurs because the queen dies or is unable to reproduce, and that experienced beekeepers can determine whether the queen is alive purely by the sound of the hive. She used this knowledge to build a WiFi module equipped with sensors to capture data inside and outside the hive to determine whether the queen is present and healthy.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Anna organized a fundraiser selling her bees’ honey, raising $5,400 for the Nova Ukraine humanitarian aid organization. She interviewed Petrova, who is from Ukraine, for Journals of Justice, an organization she co-founded to give students an outlet to advocate for social causes through journalism.
