Whiz Kids of the Week: Daniel Ki and Vani Mulkareddy

Cupertino Patch loves to celebrate the youth of the city for their accomplishments such as community service, academic and athletic achievements, innovative and entrepreneurial ideas, or creative talents.

Here are this week’s Whiz Kids.

Whiz Kids:

Daniel Ki of Monta Vista High School and Vani Mulkareddy of Cupertino High School.

Why They’re Whizzy:

They are both winners of a $1,000 2011 Comcast Leaders and Achievers® Scholarship.

The program recognizes high school seniors for leadership skills, positive attitude, academic achievement and other community service activities.

The Comcast scholarship program handed out $210,000 in scholarships this year—two students received $10,000 apiece.

What Else:

Ki earned the scholarship in large part for his leadership skills. He was a debate captain at Monta Vista, which has no full-time debate coach, Ki says, leaving to the students the responsibility of all their own research, preparation and organization of debate tournaments. He was class president for his first three years in high school, and was AC president in his senior year. Ki’s volunteer work included outreach work on behalf of the Asian Liver Center at Stanford University to get information out to the Asian community about Hepatitis B.

Ki will attend Harvard University in the fall where he plans to major in government.

Mulkareddy earned the scholarship in part for her volunteer and leadership activity. She volunteered at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital where she did paperwork, babysat some patients, worked in the library and helped tutor some of the younger patients. Among her leadership role activities she worked at Sunday Friends, a nonprofit that works with homeless; president of the mock trial team at Cupertino High School; and she was an editor of the school newspaper.

Mulkareddy will attend Stonybrook University in the fall and plans to study biology.

Congratulations!