Two ACS Students Win the 2024 Yale Book Award
This summer, the Yale Club of Bulgaria (YCB) announced the five winners of its annual Yale Book Award for Exceptional High School Students. We were delighted to see two ACSers among them - Marina Borisova and Kaloyan Dimitrov, both Class of 2025. The other three awardees represented the Sofia Math School, the Varna Math School, and the National Natural Science and Math School.
Through this award, YCB seeks to celebrate high school students who exhibit outstanding character and intellectual promise, as well as a commitment to their local community. The award is part of the Club’s commitment to recognizing academic and personal excellence and to encouraging potential candidates for admission to Yale College. Dozens of candidates were nominated for the award, the five finalists selected representing a true cross-section of young Bulgarians’ diverse talents, interests and commitment to community engagement.
The awardees of the annual Yale Book Award, nominated by their teachers are as follows:
- Alexandria Chaliovski, Sofia Math School
- Kaloyan Dimitrov, American College of Sofia
- Maria Todorova, Varna Math School
- Marina Borisova, American College of Sofia
- Mila Ghetova, Natural Science and Math School, Sofia (NPMG)
Here are YCB's short presentations of our award winning students:
Marina Borisova's greatest passion is literature and most of her time is spent on reading or writing. She has been part of the ACS English Drama Program since Grade 8, co-founded the Lyrics Writing Club at the College, and in the past school year she became Editor-in-Chief of the ACS student newspaper College Life. In her free time, Marina writes poetry, song lyrics, short stories, and she has even written a two-act play. She wants to pursue a career in publishing since she strongly believes that literature is a powerful force that drives humanity onward.
Kaloyan Dimitrov is an aspiring engineer with a strong belief in the power of interdisciplinary knowledge, who often draws inspiration from nature. His various projects include a research paper on swarm robotics inspired by ant behavior, a robotic bee to combat declining bee populations, and an affordable robotic dog for educational purposes. Graduating from the rigorous space bootcamp Space Challenges, he led a team to create a ground station for communication with a real satellite orbiting our planet. He is the chairman of the makerspace committee at ACS, a president of the Robotics Club, and also a captain of the first Bulgarian team to compete in the prestigious international robotics competition – FIRST in Turkey.