After four years of outstanding grades, student leadership and extracurricular activities, Incline High School’s two salutatorians, Katherine Mancuso and Liz Ferme are ready to move on to the next chapter of their lives.
For Ferme, that means prestigious Wellesley College, an all-women institution outside of Boston, Mass.
“I think the people I’ve met who are going there next year and the people who go there now convinced me to go,” Ferme said. “A lot of powerful women came from there, like Hillary Clinton, and after I visited I loved the campus.”
Mancuso said she was sold on Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., after she visited in the cold of a Michigan winter and was still impressed.
“I knew it was unique and different after visiting in the middle of winter, I really liked it,” Mancuso said.
Both took on a variety of leadership roles in their time at IHS and say extra-curricular activities gave them pride in addition to their grades at Incline.
“I was very proud of how prom turned out last year,” Mancuso said, as she served as a co-coordinator for the 2007 event. “We worked really hard on it and we worked well with everyone involved, it seemed like we didn’t have a single problem.”
Ferme, who served on the IHS student congress as president, said balancing her time between school, extra curriculars and free time wasn’t too much of a challenge.
“I don’t think what I did outside of class had any impact on my grades,” Ferme said. “(The extra-curriculars) kind of blended together with my free time because the friends I hang out with are also in my classes and activities.”
Both participated in sports, with Mancuso playing soccer, running track and serving as a senior captain for the IHS cross country team.
Ferme played tennis and said she improved greatly between her sophomore and senior years.
Mancuso said she would like to double-major at Hillsdale in English and Spanish.
“I was really impressed at Hillsdale when I got to sit in on a Spanish class, they were talking about world politics and doing it in Spanish, and I thought that was cool,” Mancuso said.
She said she would eventually like to go into law and possibly politics, something Mancuso says Hillsdale will help her decide because of their internship program in Washington, D.C.
Ferme said she expects to major in neuroscience at Wellesley, and may eventually like to become a medical researcher.
“I just love math and science, I like figuring out and working through the problems in both subjects,” Ferme said.