This is the sixth of a series of 20 profiles of The Gazette’s Best and Brightest Class of 2020.

Loneliness is painful and can be debilitating. But some find it useful. Exclusion makes a good brain work very hard. Isolation can build many great qualities. And Angel Wang grew because of her isolation.

A self-proclaimed outlier, Angel did not develop many social skills in her earlier years. She overcame her social shell and joined a club volleyball team at age 12 after developing an interest for it at the YMCA where she and her family would go Sundays.

She played, but had to endure cruel teasing and painful ridicule from her teammates that season, which deeply affected her.

Angel played club volleyball for six years in the libero position. She also played for Pine Creek High School in her freshman and sophomore years but was cut from her high school team in her junior year and did not make the team senior year.

Undaunted, she asked for feedback and practiced more, focusing on her weaknesses. She shaped herself into a better player.

Described by her career counselor as “the most humble and kind valedictorians our school has ever witnessed,” she did not let that rejection manifest into something corrosive.

An active hospital volunteer, she helped to implement a program that knits hats for babies. Angel helps the doctors and nurses with patients, among many other things. The list of ways Angel volunteers is far too long to list here.

She is a member of three honor societies: math (Mu Alpha Theta), science, and The National Honor Society. national honor She also participates in the Knowledge Bowl and FIRST Robotics, an international high school robotics competition.

Angel and her sister have their own YouTube Channel with 26,000 subscribers. They write English lyrics to international Kpop fans who don’t speak Korean, helping them to understand the songs’ meanings.

With a 4.83 GPA, Angel scored 35 on her ACT and 1450 on her SAT, which she took with a concussion fog. Two days prior she played a volleyball game in which she bounced her head twice on the floor making a play. She had an arduous 10-hour drive home. The next day she took her SAT.

In 2020, Angel won the National Center for Women & Information Technology Award for Aspirations in Computing. Additionally, she won the 2018 and 2019 AP Scholar with Distinction awards, and several others.

Angel will attend California Institute of Technology. She will study computer science to develop artificial intelligence, where the CPU is the brain of the computer.

She hopes to create medicine that attends to every individual’s needs and to shape the future of medicine.

She plans to play volleyball in college and wants to play tennis if she has enough time.

Volleyball has helped her build confidence and to put more of her ideas forward.

Although there are still times when she retracts into that former shy, unsure self, she relies on her well-developed life skills that brought her out of it in the first place.

Pine Creek High School

College Plans: California Institute of Technology

Parent(s): Xiaoqin Che and Xudong Wang

Other: AP Scholar with Distinction; National AP Scholar; State Qualified Knowledge Bowl

Angel WangBESTBRIGHT2020