As President of Paint Club and French Club, the Vice President of the California Scholarship Federation, and an Editor-in-Chief of Yearbook, Lyu has led a busy life and immersed herself in a wide variety of extracurricular activities at school.

“They just taught me so much. It taught me what commitment is, and what hard work really is. With organizations like those, being able to step up… You had to genuinely be dedicated and committed; it’s stuff that I started in high school and rose up through the ranks in,” Lyu said.

She has recently been accepted to USC and the UC Berkeley and has received a “likely” letter to the University of Pennsylvania, which is an unofficial acceptance sent to a small pool of a school’s most coveted applicants. The senior was flown out to Penn for a brief invitation-only program, which piqued her interest in the school. Lyu plans to major in biology.

“I love biology so much. I actually like biology a lot more for the analysis and the interpretation side of it, which most people don’t get a sense of,” Lyu said.

While her school year is packed with extracurricular activities and schoolwork, Lyu also filled her summers with internships. Being a part of Brahma Tech, Lyu was required to complete an internship, for which she worked closely with a local doctor.

Additionally, she was a part of the Aid Summer 2014 program, which is an annual summer program that recruits around 400 students to teach English to impoverished children in Taiwan.

“I actually considered another program where I would be conducting research for 10 weeks, and I thought that would align a lot better with my major, but being able to teach English to children is so much more eye-opening. It’s so unique. It sounds cheesy, but it really was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Lyu said.

Lyu thinks that out of all of her high school experiences, extracurriculars were the most memorable. She has spent three years in Yearbook and is now standing triumphantly at the top of the food chain as the co-Editor-in-Chief, spending her fifth periods in the familiar world of page design and copy editing.

“Yearbook taught me how to grow out of my comfort zone. As a staffer in Yearbook, I was interviewing people from all different groups. My favorite thing about Yearbook is how much correlation there is between hard work and rewards. Yearbook is one of those special organization where if you really put in the time, it’ll show and you’ll be able to step up and take charge,” Lyu said.

The senior credits her supportive parents as one of the most essential elements of her success and thanks them for not putting any pressure on her.

“Something that I really appreciate personally is the fact that my parents put no pressure on me whatsoever. They just want me to live a happy life, and I think it’s really sweet. Because of that, I think it motivates me in the way because I know that whatever I’m doing, it’s for me and not anyone else. The benefit of that is that everything that I do, it’s of my own free will and it’s what I genuinely enjoy,” Lyu said.