Heights High senior wins foreign service award

Natasha Madorsky, a Heights High senior, won first place in the American Foreign Service Association’s (AFSA) 2012 National Essay Contest. More than 500 students, from 22 states and abroad, entered the contest.

Madorksky’s essay about how to improve relations between the United States and South Sudan “was judged as one of the best ever in the 14-year history of this prestigious nationwide contest,” said Thomas W. Switzer, director of communications for AFSA. He said that thousands of high school students have entered the contest over the years. “Very few of them had any prior awareness of the critical role of the Foreign Service for key national interests,” he continued.

Natasha and her parents, Elizabeth Stern and Michael Madorsky, along with English teacher Peggy Hull, traveled to Washington, D.C. where they met with Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton on July 26. The award also includes $2,500 and a college scholarship for a Semester at Sea.

“I was so excited when AFSA called to tell me I had won!” said Madorsky. “And getting to meet Secretary Clinton was like a dream come true.”

Writing the award-winning essay was the most recent of Madorsky’s activities in international relations. As a sixth grader at Roxboro Middle School, she joined the Model United Nations program and has been a leader in the program since then. She is currently the president of the Heights High Chapter and assistant secretary-general of the Ohio Model U.N.

“I am interested in learning about the issues in developing nations,” she said. “I worked on a Model U.N. resolution for Senegal, mostly focused on education.” That experience helped shape her interest in South Sudan. “It is such a new country and faces many challenges,” she added. “There is really an opportunity to make an impact there."

In her essay, Madorsky discusses the importance of the Foreign Service taking both a “top-down and grassroots approach to nation building." (Read the essay at: www.chuh.org/includes/uploads/schools/HSHeights/pdf_files/natasha_madorsky_essay_105.pdf.)

Madorsky will take several classes at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) during her senior year as part of the CWRU Pre-College Program and the Ohio Post Secondary Enrollment Option. She plans to apply to Princeton and Harvard to study foreign relations. 

Madorsky is active in many service organizations at Heights High and Temple-Tifereth Israel. She raises funds for Girl Up, and is a 2012 summer intern at the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at CWRU, and at the Ohio Democratic Party.