Arroyo High School graduate Alexa Adutwum, a first-generation American and a student in San Lorenzo Schools since kindergarten, will continue toward a medical career as a freshman this fall at Stanford University in Palo Alto, with an interest in molecular biology.
Her older sister, Michelle, who graduated from Arroyo in 2022, just completed her undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in molecular and cellular biology and will apply to medical schools during a planned gap year.
The younger Adutwum is this year’s Arroyo salutatorian, second in her class with a 4.36 cumulative grade point average. She has completed seven advanced placement (AP) classes and earned 16 credits through concurrent and dual enrollment at Chabot College, focused on humanities.
She also was accepted at Yale University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania and has received three scholarships: the Netzali Can Scholarship, awarded in memory of a young Arroyo graduate who died of a sudden illness abroad; the Frank Wells Memorial Scholarship from Region 6 of the Association of California School Administrators; and another through the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Adutwum’s secret to success may be that she is highly pragmatic. At Chabot, she chose courses such as sociology and administration of justice, with the goal of being “well-rounded.” In an AP literature course, she found that quizzes on daily assignments “made me very disciplined in my reading.” She said an Arroyo course called Principles of Biomedical Sciences “made me very strong in reading medical-related things and science-related things.”
In addition to classroom learning, Adutwum said she appreciates Arroyo teachers who “showed they genuinely cared” and with whom she was able to establish a personal rapport, mentioning by name Health & Medicine co-leads Selina Mandel and Dr. Samantha Johnson, as well as math teacher Georgina Mountain.
“I was comfortable asking whatever question I had or, honestly, talking about really anything,” Adutwum said.
Teachers also helped her identify and successfully apply to career related summer experiences – a weeklong “cardiac camp” at the University of California, San Francisco; a STEM internship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and, in the summer before her senior year, a challenging internship back at UCSF, where she summarized scientific journal articles and extracted DNA and RNA nucleic acids in a laboratory.
“I had to read those papers in order to understand what I was doing,” Adutwum said.
She said she discovered that final opportunity through Mandel, who makes a practice of widely sharing things, “and whoever wants to apply can.”
Adutwum belonged to the Health & Medicine Leadership Club, helping acclimate incoming students to that Small Learning Community. She joined the Black Student Union affinity group as well, taking on successive leadership roles as event coordinator, secretary and finally as president.
Describing herself as someone who also “loves sports,” Adutwum played volleyball and basketball from her freshman through junior years, including co-captain roles, before stepping away this past year because a family move led to a long commute.
Adutwum grew up in an environment that valued academic achievement, with both parents working as professionals with postgraduate degrees. She also has invested many hours of independent study through the online Khan Academy, with steady encouragement from her father.
Her sister, while busy with her own demanding studies in Baltimore, took time to read over her writings “to make sure it made sense,” she said.
“The extra time that everyone around me was putting in made me feel like I had to do well,” Adutwum said.
A collective mindset also informs her goal of becoming a doctor. Both of her parents are immigrants from Ghana, a country she has yet to experience firsthand, but she is aware of health care challenges among her relatives. That includes a grandmother who recently suffered a severe stroke and required her mother’s direct intervention in order to receive timely care.
Adutwum sees her extended family as a microcosm of global health disparities that she aspires to help address in her lifetime.
“I am privileged when it comes to health care compared to many low- and middle-income countries,” she said. “ … I want to be able to help my family, but not just my family – people like my family.”