Kaniyah Parris is the WHSAD Junior for the week of December 17th. Kaniyah’s teachers selected her for her persevering mindset, intellectual abilities, willingness to collaborate, and genuine nature. Her Algebra teacher, Mr. Kaufman, says, “Kaniyah is constantly improving. She is able to explain concepts to other students and adapts to new mathematical ideas with great skill.”
Congratulations, Kaniyah!
Below are some of Kaniyah’s thoughts on what she has gained from WHSAD and what her future plans are after she graduates.
I am Kaniyah Parris, and I’m a junior at WHSAD. My accomplishments are being on the honor roll every year and winning the Gensler Bushwick Hotel Project competition. I am also in Architecture GRILLE, Architecture Club, and SkillsUSA. Architecture GRILLE is a club where we go to the Architecture GRILLE building in Brooklyn where people design, craft, and sell custom grilles. The students in the club get a chance to make their own grille catalogs and create the actual grilles in the factory. Architecture club is basically a simulator for real life architecture jobs. We work on a couple projects for the year using architecture software and then present our finished products. Finally, SkillsUSA is a club run by students, and we basically do community service and national competitions. Thanks to WHSAD, I did my first paid internship over the summer at Green-Wood Cemetery, where I mostly did office work: scanning, printing, sorting archives, and similar things. I learned many interesting things about the cemetery, such as the history behind it, the people that were buried there, and just how important the cemetery actually is.
In the future, I want to become an architect/designer. I wanted to do something artistic and creative as my career. Something I could create and be proud of, and something that will make others feel awed and inspired. In middle school, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to be until I saw this school in the high school handbook, I thought, “Well this is an idea.” Once again, thanks to WHSAD’s activities and programs, I was able to make all these achievements and have a better understanding of what I can do.