Local teen wins trip to Russia | News

Eleventh-grader Wyatt Smith of Clifton Park was the winner of the second annual Albany-Tula Alliance Student Essay Contest.

Smith will be traveling to Russia in September 2011 with a chaperone from the Albany-Tula Alliance for a two week stay in Tula. There he and two other contest winners will meet with other students and have an opportunity to attend classes at Lev Tolstoy Tula State Pedagogical Institute.

In this year's competition, which took place in February, students ages 16 to 18 submitted 1,500 word essays on the role that the space race might play in maintaining world peace and technological cooperation.

Wyatt has been homeschooled since fifth grade when he left the public schools in search of greater academic challenge. He has augmented his homeschooling since ninth grade by taking classes at Union College and RPI, where he has earned straight A's. One of a select group of students in New York state in competition math, he is also a National Merit and AP scholar.
A passionate musician, he has played percussion with a regional adult orchestra since 2008, and writes and records his own songs with his band. His athletic interests include sailing and competitive rowing. He volunteers as a math tutor for middle school and is in his fourth year of training to be a counselor at a national camp for highly gifted children in Michigan.

Wyatt's award was presented on May 20th by Barbara Jancar-Webster, head of the Albany-Tula Alliance Education and Culture Committee.  

Russian Cosmonaut Sergey Zalyotin, who was to have presented the award at the Albany-Tula Alliance's 20th anniversary celebration in the Thomas M. Whalen Tricentennial Park, was unable to be present. Arrangements are now being made to introduce Wyatt to him in Tula in September.

Accompanying Wyatt to Tula in September will be the first place winner of the Alliance's first American-Studies Olympiad, David Connor of Troy and second-place winner Alessandra Pratt of North Warren.  

The Olympiad is modeled upon a highly successful contest created last year by professor Sergey Pukhanov of Tula State University in 2010. The winners of that Olympiad traveled here this spring to participate as judges in the Capital Region competition.