Woburn Memorial High Student is $10,000 McKeown Scholar

WOBURN, Mass., May 22, 2013 –Woburn Memorial High School has selected graduating senior Michael Paladino as this year’s McKeown Scholar. Paladino topped 40 classmates to earn the honor, which is accompanied by a $10,000 merit scholarship to be applied to the four-year college or university of his choice.

Paladino will be recognized during the Senior Scholarship Assembly in Woburn Memorial High School’s Flaherty Auditorium on Wednesday, May 29 at 7:00 PM. Denise McKeown, widow of Jamie McKeown, for whom the award is named, will present Paladino with a framed certificate.

The McKeown Scholars competition, now in its 17^th year, is sponsored by Woburn-based Cummings Foundation. According to Joel Swets, the Foundation’s executive director, “Michael’s sterling academic achievements, extracurricular activities, and community service make him an excellent example of a McKeown scholar. We are delighted to award him this scholarship.”

Ranked first in his graduating class, Paladino serves as class president and a member of the National Honor Society. He also runs cross country, performs in the band and chorus, and is a recipient of numerous academic and extracurricular awards.

Commited to serving the community, Paladino established an information kiosk at Spence Farm as his final project before earning the highly-respected Eagle Scout title in 2011. This fall, he will attend Harvard University, where he plans to major in Chemistry.

Woburn’s high school seniors in the top 20 percent of their class were invited to participate in the McKeown Scholars competition, which began on March 6 with a written essay under exam conditions at Woburn Memorial High School. Staff from the school’s English Department evaluated the anonymous essays and selected the top three as finalists for the award. The winner was determined based on overall essay quality, application packet, community service record, outstanding reputation, and a personal interview.

This year’s essay question asked students to discuss the positive and negative aspects of society’s growing dependence on computers. In his essay, Paladino asserted that the benefits of our culture’s technological dependence outweigh the risks, noting that computers provide quick information and contribute to ease of communication.

Paladino said, “The topic is one that heavily affects my generation. I am so used to using computers, but I had never considered their impact on my everyday life. Once I thought about it, I really enjoyed writing the essay.”

2013 McKeown Scholar essay topic

We are becoming overwhelmingly dependent on computers. Is this dependence on computers a good thing or should we be more suspicious of their benefits?

Essay by 2013 McKeown Scholar Michael Paladino

(unedited from original submission)

Innovating for the Future

Since the dawn of the technical age, many have speculated over the potential dangers of technology. Movies such as Terminator and The Matrix show just that, depicting dystopian futures in which machines have outsmarted and overtaken the human race. Of course, these films portray the extreme; however, one cannot help but wonder if computers increase our knowledge and skills in the world, or whether they actually decrease them due to overreliance on technology. The benefits and risks are both great in their own depths, yet overall, computers are indeed a good thing, and depending on them to perform tasks and make life easier should be encouraged.

In today’s world, computers are brighter, thinner, sleeker, and faster. Virtually any news source in the world can be found online. Investment trading can now be performed across continents in seconds from one computer to another, never even reaching the eyes of a human until the transaction is already complete. People video-chat, have conference calls, pay their bills, buy music; some practically live on the Internet. Many might say this is a degradation of society, citing that people too often remain indoors, avoiding social contact, as well as the loss of morality in the Internet, which has its merits in the netherlands of cyberspace. However, those “Internet-junkies,” the ones who live, eat, and breathe to blog, constitute only a small minority of all Internet users. For the majority of us, the Internet, and computers by association, is simply a tool – arguably one of the best ever invented. It increases convenience in our lives and allows for the easier transmission of thoughts, ideas, news, and information as a whole. The Internet allows us to learn more about the world, see places that would otherwise never be seen, and converse with people whom we would never meet. Economically, it provides an entirely new market through which people may buy, sell, or lend, and allows it all to happen instantaneously in the comfort of a home or office. All together, computers allow the world to run more smoothly, a feat which must not be underestimated.

However, computers are useful for far more than merely the Internet – online shopping and Skype are great, but the technological and mathematical capabilities of computers are far more useful to mankind. When it comes down to it, man is undoubtedly the most intelligent form of life on Earth; but we are still human. Man has its limitations. The most striking of these is time efficiency, as a human brain can only do so much at a time. Computers have the incredible ability to calculate things rapidly, transfer information immediately, and keep doing so for as long as we plug them in. Without computers, man would not have made it to space, nor would we have access to the same benefits of manufacturing, pricing, and graphical analysis. Projections for companies, governments, and any other firm are made via computers, and scientific research is greatly bolstered by the ability to run tests and program machines to perform tasks. Of course, these calculations could be done by hand, but it would be far less efficient. By increasing our efficiency, computers have allowed us to increase our innovation, as seen in the biomedical industry, through which we may now take oxygen levels with lasers, without ever pricking a finger, or even perform surgeries without surgeons in the room. In addition, computers found in robotics allow us to venture and work in a dangerous or hazardous environment, giving us information where we cannot go ourselves, such as sonar technology that aids in finding things deep in the ocean, or other computing techniques to find oil reserves embedded in the earth.  Computers allow mankind to live as it does today, for just about every innovation – every new car, advancement in medical technology, or even advanced food and drug production – has its basis in computing technology.

Naturally, this begs the question: is this dangerous? If so much of our lives hail from computers, are there not inherent dangers in the ignorance of how it is all done, in the blink of an eye, intangibly and invisibly? Such a case may be so for Arnold Schwarzenager, but not in real life. In real life, we are the masters of machines, not the other way around. The key point in moving into the future is a better understanding of how these computing processes work, and how we can use them to better ourselves and society. Behind every equation or piece of software is a mind that made it up, for after all, a computer is useless unless told what to do. Most may think of the Bill Gates and the Zuckerbergs of the world, yet just about anyone can learn to code, encrypt, and create. The key is increasing the number of people with a good understanding of computers, and using that technology to achieve our goals, and as long as we know how to do something, the means are irrelevant. Some may say that relying on computers decreases our own knowledge of the world, and how to do things, but that assumption is in itself false: We can only tell computers to do what we already know. The mystery of human thought, discovery, and intellect still remains in the air.

In the end, computers allow us to live our lives to the fullest, to innovate, to discover, and do it all as efficiently as possible. Dependency, or using them too often, is not the issue; the issue is failing to use them enough. The risks, as seen in those who live on the Internet, or refer to a calculator for everything, are far outweighed by the benefits, as seen in a patient who will now live because of an artificial heart, or as seen by the astronaut from a space station. The use of computers should be embraced; we simply can’t afford the opposite.