Emma Beltzer grew up in Alaska and attended Sand Lake elementary, where she later on joined Japanese immersion. After elementary school she went to Mears, and now AJ Dimond high school. She has a maintained GPA of 4.416 weighted, and is part of Key, and NHS club. She was the captain of the swimming team this year, and she attended the ASAA state championship for the 50 Free and 100 Free. Her junior year she was in Junior soccer but will not be continuing her senior year, but after the cross-country skiing season she will be going back to attending club swimming. If she attends a college with a D3 swim team she would like to contact the coach to walk onto the team or even join a rec team. She would like to major in pre-med, biochemistry, or Japanese. She would like to pursue a career as a pediatric allergist. She is not sure what college she would like to attend at this time.

“I’m planning to go anywhere where I can focus on academics because I want to go attend med school, so I’d like to leave undergrad without a ton of debt and feeling prepared. I don’t mind what school it is as long as it’s not too hot and not in the Midwest.”

Her Junior year she got a B in AP Calc. AB and later retook it in the summer of 2021 to get a better understanding and possible better grade. She feels like she has to work with math a little bit harder than others. “All this work, I don’t hate it.” 

Due to not having a lot of free time, when she does have spare time aside from her studies she likes to either hangout with friends or read to de-stress. 

Something she would say to younger classmen is, “ If you work hard enough you can definitely obtain it.” 

She never thought she would be the salutatorian but one day she looked at her class rank and grades and thought it was achievable.

“Valedictorians are not mythological beings, they are just like anyone else […] It is a reasonable goal to have, somebody has to be up there, why can’t it be you?”-Emma