“I remember my first day, orientation day,” Aarya said at the start of our interview. “We did this building competition where we had to build a tower out of popsicle sticks and tape. And that was fun…

“cause I’m pretty competitive.”

Pretty competitive is something of an understatement.

When he started at BASIS Independent McLean in grade 9, Aarya says he “wanted to be the best academically, the best outside of school. I also wanted to have the most friends” (which, he pointed out with a wry chuckle, is not a great way to look at friendship). So he did everything.

“I signed up for like five APs and every club I could think of: Quiz Bowl, debate, Model UN. I started a news channel. I ran for house government. I also did karate after school for like four hours every day.” Two weeks in, Mr. Lentz sat him down, looked at his schedule, and asked him what he was thinking.

Aarya learned to cut back, but he still juggles so many activities that one wonders where he finds the time. And he’s still competitive. He wanted to get into every college he applied to – Harvard, Stanford, UNC, and UC Berkeley, on a Morehead-Cain scholarship – and he did. But he’s come a long way from the kid whose driving motivation was to be the best at everything.

The biggest change, he says, has been in terms of authenticity. Early on in high school, he felt like “there was a lot of splitting myself up into different personalities based on what fits best for that role. I think that trying to preserve the true Aarya has been a very big change.”

So who is the true Aarya?

He’s enthusiastic. In the last four years, he’s started an online tutoring business, done research at labs at Harvard and Stanford, worked for a nonprofit delivering prosthetics to developing nations, competed in the BASIS business competition, debated, TAed classes, taught karate, and done an internship at MITRE. And he’s done all of it with a smile on his face.

He’s curious. Mr. Ramsby noted that he often saw Aarya talking with teachers after class, digging deeper into whatever the topic of the day was. Dr. Hight remembers mentioning the Ship of Theseus to Aarya early in the fall of his senior year, which led to Aarya spending two weeks reading everything he could on the philosophy of identity and developing a mathematical formula to try to prove psychological unity.

His curiosity is perhaps best demonstrated, though, by his AP Research project. Aarya could have dug deeper into his research on the computer modeling of blood flow or delved more deeply into math or computer science. Instead, he explored a different passion: pizza. He did it in the most Aarya way possible: with a complex experimental procedure and sophisticated statistical analysis to determine the ideal technique for making official-quality Neapolitan pizza – which normally requires an 800-degree brick oven – in a conventional home oven.

Aarya says it taught him the importance of being passionate about your work. But he also learned that the biggest rewards don’t always come from the work itself or the article that it produces. “A byproduct of doing these pizza experiments,” he says, “was that I made so much pizza that I had a lot of moments when I invited friends over to my house to try it. It ended up being a lot of fun. And I bonded with my dad, too, because he also loves making pizza.”

Those bonding moments reflect something else important about Aarya: he’s caring.

There’s a moment, he says, that he comes back to at least once every couple of weeks. He was in Trinidad, helping to distribute and fit prosthetics for kids who had never had them. His very first fitting was for a thirteen-year-old boy named Mario, who had never walked. While Aarya struggled to fit the prosthetic, he talked to Mario about how hard it was living in a wheelchair. It wasn’t just that Mario had missed out on sports and a host of other experiences. He said that being in a wheelchair – being lower than everyone else – meant he was routinely left out in everyday conversations.

Aarya remembers that when he finally got the prosthetic on, and Mario was able to stand, “his mom came to me, and she was crying, and she gave me a really big hug. I always come back to this moment to remind myself that everything I’m doing is for moments like this: to give people these experiences that will benefit their life for much longer than I’m in the world.”

That’s Aarya. He’s energetic, outgoing, curious, compassionate, and wise beyond his years. He says that from the start of high school he dreamed of getting into Stanford, but after he got in, “I was happy for maybe twenty-four hours before it faded.” Looking back, he says, he realizes that the things that really mattered are “the happy moments I had. It’s like the moment I had with Mario, the fun I had with my friends, the times chatting and laughing with teachers after class. That’s what I’m going to take away.”

After all the AP classes and lab work and internships, that’s the most important thing Aarya learned at BASIS Independent McLean. It’s not about winning. It’s about the journey.

We wish him all the best and many more happy moments as he continues that journey next fall at Stanford!

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BASIS Independent McLean is an Age 2–Grade 12 private school, providing students with an internationally benchmarked liberal arts and sciences curriculum, with advanced STEM offerings. Considering joining the Red-Tailed Hawks community? To join our interest list for the next school year and receive admissions updates and more, please click here.