3 Oak Lawn Spartans Awarded With Full Scholarships

OAK LAWN, IL — Three Oak Lawn Community High School seniors have been awarded full, four-year scholarships from QuestBridge. The program connects the nation's brightest students from low-income backgrounds with leading institutions of higher education and further opportunities.

Malik Adi, Lepmarded Orbea and Patrycia Szlembarski were among 20,800 applicants. All three have an average unweighted GPA of 3.94.

QuestBridge selected 6,683 finalists to be considered for the QuestBridge National College Match Scholarship. This year, QuestBridge’s 50 college partners matched with 2,242 Finalists, who are recognized as Match Scholarship Recipients. This is the highest number of Match Scholarship Recipients to date for QuestBridge.

Malik Adi, accepted to both Yale and Stanford, will attend Stanford in the fall. OLCHS counselor Sam Razik said: ““Malik is amazing. He is one of the most dedicated and goal-oriented students I know who still likes to have fun.”

Leonardo Orbea plans to attend Northwestern and major in biomedical engineering.

“I am so proud of Leonardo,” OLCHS counselor Jason Rhodes said. “He possesses a true hunger for knowledge and learning and is incredibly driven to succeed. The strides he has made here at OLCHS as a student are nothing short of remarkable and I cannot think of anyone more deserving of this scholarship.”

Patrycia Szlembarski will attend Denison University. Counselor Tim Krupa said, “Patrycia started working with Questbridge during her junior year. She is really organized, meets deadlines, and is a good writer. All three of these skills were demonstrated during the application process. Patrycia has taken as many honors and AP classes as a student can take at OLCHS. But her maturity and critical thinking is on a different level. She is well prepared for college and beyond.”

~ Contributed by Jennifer Jepsen, OLCHS Staff Writer