Junior, St. Vincent-St. Mary High School
From launching rockets nearly a mile in the sky to debating global policy, Albanese seems set to take both the United Nations and NASA by storm. St. Vincent-St. Mary’s team has qualified for nationals of the Team America Rocketry Challenge seven years in a row, and she competes regularly with Model United Nations, defending the right to access water and education around the world. After Model UN camps in Washington, D.C., and Boston this summer, the 16-year-old put her diplomacy skills to the test at an international Model UN conference in Beijing. Commander in Chief: At the Model UN state competition last year — which her team won — Albanese took on the role of Russian Lt. Gen. Markian Mikhailovich Popov during World War II’s Siege of Leningrad. The German army surrounded the city for 872 days, cutting off ground supply lines, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1 million civilians. She used a different Russian strategy. “I moved some of the ships to the sea and then I started sending airplanes outside of Leningrad,” she says. “We cleared the airspace, and it worked.” Fixer-Upper: As a kid, Albanese loved taking things apart. There was just one problem: “I never could put them back together,” she says. So she followed her older brother onto the Robotics and Rocket Team as a freshman. As captain of the Rocketry Challenge team this year, she’s tasked with building a rocket that will launch 775 feet in the air and safely deliver an egg to the ground. “Surprisingly, that’s the simplest part,” she says. “We just take Styrofoam, and it always holds.” Mission to Mars: At last year’s NASA Student Launch competition, Albanese and her team developed a rover that could find the rocket once it returned to Earth. “We didn’t [use] GPS because we wanted to make it pertaining to Mars,” she says. Instead, they used radio signals between the rover and rocket. “Radio signals bounce back and forth and then command the rover to go directly toward the rocket,” she says. “It was really cool to program all of that.” The Hills are Alive: “Probably the most relaxing thing I do is theater,” says Albanese, who most recently played a nun in her school’s production of The Sound of Music. “It’s fun to have that creativity. It calms you down.” Watch the Throne: While Albanese admires multiple women in politics, her primary role model is Queen Elizabeth II of England. “She’s amazing,” she says. “You can see how long she’s holding on, holding on to that crown.”
