A Presidential Scholar in Arts

While receiving the award might have been a shock, it was a long time coming for Cheng, a graduate (as of Thursday) of Burlingame High School who will study speculative design and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego next fall. 

There are approximately 3.4 million graduating seniors in the United States every year. In May of their graduating year, 161 of them receive the designation of U.S. Presidential Scholar, selected by a White House Committee. The most common way to earn the award is through exceptional standardized test scores. But there are also 40 spots designated to recognize students with outstanding achievements outside of the classroom — 20 for Career and Technical Education, and 20 for the Arts. 

To designate Arts scholars, the White House works with YoungArts, an organization that runs an annual competition that serves as the first hurdle for scholar hopefuls. Cheng and 10,000 other students applied to YoungArts this October. One-hundred-and-fifty-one winners, including Chen, are then sent to Miami in early January to showcase design skills live in a “Project Runway-style” competition with workshops and challenges each day. From there, YoungArts nominated 60 candidates to the White House, which vets the final 20 over the next few months. 

“It’s pretty crazy because it’s such a long journey,” Cheng said. “I knew about Presidential Scholars before I applied to YoungArts, and that’s why I applied to YoungArts actually, because this was my end goal, but there’s no guarantee you can get to this point. You just have to keep working on it, month after month.”

But that’s not all Cheng was working on at the time. She also entered — and won — the U.S. Congressional Art Competition run by U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-South San Francisco.

“So many of the submitted pieces were really good and it was almost like a fallacy in my brain where I felt it was unlikely I’d win the two awards back to back even though they were independent.”

The art piece that won both competitions originated at a graphic design summer camp last year. When asked to create a typographic poster, Cheng immediately knew she wanted to tackle a social justice issue. 

“My peers went more towards the advertisement route, they would do an ice cream ad or an album cover,” Cheng said. “But I felt like this was an opportunity to kind of funnel my angst about an issue and pour it on the paper.”

Her poster, which will hang in the Capitol for lawmakers and visitors to ponder, is a sharp critique of the gun violence crisis in America. It includes 646 dots to visually represent the 646 mass shootings recorded in the United States in 2022, accompanied by a plea: ‘Please no more dots.”

“The whole point of it was to overwhelm the viewer and have them really think and reflect,” Cheng said. “I wanted it to be kind of evocative.”

Cheng combined analog and digital media to create the poster. For instance, the text was scanned and recolored manually rather than typed, and she drew the 646 dots by hand. Arranging the dots alone, Cheng said, took eight hours. 

“The whole point of that process is to really ensure that everything was unique and that plays into the idea that the victims of mass shootings have unique stories and they are unique individuals.”

For Cheng, designing political graphic art like this is a way to combine her artistic talent and her STEM background, with the added bonus of contributing to social change. She hopes to work on a political campaign as a designer in the future — and maybe, one day, for a future female president.

“If I had those two things separately, I think I wouldn’t feel as inspired,” she said. “But when I combine them, I feel the best. It’s logic and creativity.”

Elise Spenner is a recent graduate of Burlingame High School. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.