Born in 1983, Eugene Kreydin is now a freshman at Harvard College. A proud member of the first Boston Latin School class of the third millennium, Eugene has lived in Brighton since 1997, when he moved there from Everett to attend BLS. At Latin School, Eugene has been a writer and a news editor for the school newspaper, the Argo, an officer of the Future Educators of America Club, and has founded a Health Careers Exploration Club this year.
He was virtually unfamiliar with anything that dealt with politics, and until the year 2000 rolled around, he never even considered applying for a position in public service. However, exactly at midnight on January 1, Eugene was infected by the Y2K virus and he hasn’t been the same since.
But first, let us go back to September 1999: Eugene was beginning a new school year after working all summer long in the surgery unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. Innocently, he pondered about his future and the future of medicine with him in it. “With all the experience I got from working at MGH, I will make a fine lab assistant for next summer,” he thought. And indeed, Eugene had always been a person who preferred science to everything else, all extracurricular experience he had ever had came from hospitals and laboratories. But suddenly, on January 2, 2000, after his dismal infection by the Y2K bug, Eugene’s interest in doing the same thing over and over again dwindled like a fichus plant without water. Many a day passed before the lucky morning when he picked up a copy of the Daily Bulletin from his home room teacher’s desk and for the first time found out about the Ward Fellowship. And so Eugene wrote a short essay for the application, and then went through an interview with Judge Wolf. By and by, the school year ended, and lo and behold he had been selected to work for Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino.
Working in the Mayor’s Office greatly broadened Eugene’s views of the professional world. He greatly enjoyed doing anything and everything that he did during the Summer of 2000. Indeed, he liked it so much that he stayed in City Hall for the entire school year. In March and April, when the application process for the 2001 Ward Fellowship began, Eugene and Fellows from previous years visited classes at Boston Latin in order to spread the word about the great opportunities that the Fellowship offers. According to Eugene, the “Fellowship Search” was successful, and this summer the program is looking great, thanks, in large, to the 2001 participants.
This year, Eugene has joined the program again, working in the Chambers of the Honorable U.S. District Court Judge Patti B. Saris. From his top-secret bunker located in the office of Judge Saris’ interns, he intrepidly directs some of the Fellowship activities, and serves as an answers-man for some of the Fellows’ questions. When he comes out of his top-secret bunker, Eugene usually finds a computer and begins to organize the many opinions that Judge Saris has written in the past seven years.
What does the future hold for Eugene? He is not sure. The only definite plan on the horizon is more school. Public service or medical college after four more year of schooling? Only time will tell.