A Head Start

Senior Apaar Bhatnagar and junior Jamie Chong get a headstart on their careers.

Photos by Tim Caver, JeTommesWay, Apaar Bhatnagar

Noelle Reid, Opinions Editor, Suhani Mahajan, Staff Writer

The moment the bell rings, the hallways become crowded, full of people rushing to get to class on time or meet up with their friends. For 5-foot-3 junior Jamie Chong, the hallways get tough to navigate for her small frame. After school, however, she owns the runway. 

Chong’s modeling career started out as just a hobby, comprised of small, fun photoshoots with her friends. She was scouted by modeling agencies, and as her interest in the profession grew, she eventually signed with two. The 17-year-old started professionally modeling her freshman year. Since then, Chong mostly does photoshoots, but she also worked on commercials, has been in magazines, and participated in runways shows.

“I really like beauty shoots, which are basically just my face. It’s either for skincare or makeup usually,” Chong said. “I had this one shoot where it was published in a magazine and I had flowers on my head. I’d say that one took two hours to do my makeup and everything, but that was a really fun shoot.”

In the modeling industry, models are either approached with an opportunity by their agency or they have to find their own. Chong’s career has so far been an equal mix of both. With an agency in Georgia and another in Tennessee, she has a lot to balance between both school and work. Chong compromises by doing jobs on the weekends when she is most free.

“I’d say it really ranges from one to five [shoots] per month for me because I’m in school. Obviously, over the summer I’ve done a lot,” Chong said. “During school, I basically just do it on weekends. I’ve only had to miss school like a few times because I prioritize school over modeling.”

Another thing Chong has to prioritize is her safety. Although the modeling industry has brought many opportunities for Chong, she still has to stay aware of what events she does and whom she is with. Chong’s mother, Viola Tan,  accompanies her to most, if not all, of her shoots for this reason.

“My mom, she’s like my backbone,” Chong said. “For any model, I feel like you should always have someone with you at a shoot or a show. This industry has a lot of good people, but there’s also a lot of bad people. It’s just good to be safe.”

As well as being there to ensure Chong’s safety, Tan is also one of her biggest supporters. Tan makes most of Chong’s calls and takes her to events. The mother-daughter duo also works together to find opportunities for Chong. Now that she has regular opportunities and has made her breakthrough in the modeling industry, things are a little easier for them. When Chong started out though, Tan played a key role in keeping their morale up when things did not go as desired. 

“The beginning was full of uncertainty. I try to be there for her, and we share excitement and frustrations together,” Tan said.

As anyone could guess, the modeling industry is extremely competitive. Clients may have their own vision for what they want, and as a result, may pick and choose models solely based on their looks. Clients can reject a model for having the smallest imperfections such as too long hair or small eyes. While this can be disheartening for many aspiring models, Chong has worked hard on her self esteem and has grown to be bigger than what could be perceived as her shortcomings.

“As a model, you have to be okay with being rejected, and just know that that’s just the art of the industry. It’s just things like that where you can’t really do anything about it. It’s not your fault. It’s just what they’re looking for,” Chong said. “At first, obviously, I was kinda discouraged. But really, if it’s anything that you enjoy, you should just keep trying no matter what people say. You’ll get there eventually.”

Tan has witnessed as her daughter built herself up and became a stronger person in the process of modeling. Any doubts and fears that Tan had for Chong have disappeared and have been replaced with confidence in her daughter.

“I see modeling and acting as a way of self-improvement and character building,” Tan said. “She has learned that true beauty comes from the inside out and that she is wonderfully and fearlessly made by the creator.”

Chong is among the millions of high school students in the United States who work jobs and one of the many students at Northview that is getting a headstart on a lifelong career. She shares this common thread with senior Apaar Bhatnagar, who became heavily involved in the programming field. For the last two years, he held a position as an intern at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. Bhatnagar did not start out at NASA, however. His interest in programming arose in the sixth grade when his mother began teaching him and his brother basic coding languages such as Java and Python. 

“[My parents] wanted both my older brother and I to learn software development at a young age,” Bhatnagar said. “They realized early on that there are a lot of global problems that can be dealt with, if not resolved, and they wanted my brother and I to help with that.” 

In eighth grade, he started doing research projects at Kennesaw State University, where he would go on to develop software that could prevent car accidents and add three-dimensional mapping programs to humanoid robots so that they could detect and diffuse dangerous situations. When Bhatnagar got to high school, he began working on two more research projects at Georgia State University during his freshman and sophomore year. First, his team worked with a psychological clinic by the name of Virtually Better, where he was able to build virtual realities to help college students who are battling mental illnesses like anxiety.  

“In a virtual world, the students will walk around a college campus and perform tasks specific to college students, such as asking a professor for a letter of recommendation or going to a party,” Bhatnagar said. 

The second research project he worked on while at Georgia State University was gathering data from the National Cancer Institute and creating an algorithm that would be able to detect colorectal cancer in patients who are older than 50. Toward the end of Bhatnagar’s sophomore year, he wanted to become a part of a research group at the Georgia Institue of Technology. In Dec. 2017, he started emailing Richard Catrambone, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology. 

“He and I had a bit of back and forth via e-mail, and then we met in my office to talk about different projects I had going on,” Catrambone said. 

After working at Catrambone’s lab for a few months, he was impressed by Bhatnagar’s maturity and ability in the field, and as a result, recommended Bhatnagar to one of his colleagues, Dorrit Billman, who works at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Palo Alto. Billman’s team gladly accepted Bhatnagar and he has been working on research projects with them since March 2018. At NASA, alongside an aerospace company called SpaceX, Bhatnagar has traced the space simulation data of astronauts in order to look for patterns of weakness; currently he is working with his team to find ways to refuel spaceships while they are in space.

“We work together well. Whenever I need someone for a new project, I tend to include [Bhatnagar] on it,” Billman said. “His understanding of whatever content we research is extremely deep.”

In working with many other experienced adults in this field, Bhatnagar believes that it can be daunting to speak up and share knowledge or ideas that can help the team. Sometimes adults will deny teenage interns the opportunity to do things that are worthwhile, and that can be discouraging. Billman thinks that it can even be intimidating for adults to see a high school student contributing to projects along with them. 

“Once they get to know him and see the work he produces, they ease into him more,” Billman said.

 Bhatnagar still researches at Georgia Tech’s Synergy Lab where he has been using a microcontroller to create many learning algorithms that run at once so that the microcontroller can be attached to a drone that aids people in natural disasters. Most likely, he will not stick with his intern position at Georgia Tech, as he plans to attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign after high school. He will stick with the NASA internship, however, at least into his freshman year of college. 

These internships have provided Bhatnagar with many opportunities and connections that could help him careerwise in the near future. However, the extensive amount of time per week that Bhatnagar dedicates to working for the two internships can sometimes take away from his high school experience. 

“I really don’t get much free time, which limits my social life,” Bhatnagar said. “[So], I cherish the limited time I get to spend with my friends.”

Whereas Bhatnagar may see spending time with friends as a luxury, many other students would see the head-starts that both him and Chong have as such. Principal Brian Downey believes that students taking these opportunities is something that makes him even more proud of Northview students. 

“This aligns so much with what I think the high school experience should be about,” Downey said.