Senior Kyle Krupansky has recently been awarded a $106K scholarship from the U.S. Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program to attend the University of Connecticut, known as Detachment 115 (Air Force ROTC units at colleges and universities are referred to as “detachments”), in the fall. UCONN was his first choice, but he also applied to the University of Rhode Island (URI) and Virginia Tech. He was accepted to all three colleges, but after spending a day at UCONN with its ROTC students, Krupansky remarked that “I knew that it would be the right environment for me.”

Unlike some other recipients of ROTC scholarships, Krupansky had no prior experience with ROTC or JROTC (Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps). ROTC is brand new to him, but military involvement isn’t. Krupansky’s mother served in the U.S. Navy for five years, and his grandfather served in the Air Force.

Krupansky hadn’t given a military career much thought before, but his primary reason for applying to the scholarship was the great opportunity it provides. “It’s a great way to start a career and receive a mostly free education,” Krupansky explained.

In terms of college plans, Krupansky plans on studying civil engineering. He will focus solely on academics for the first few months of school before joining extracurricular activities. “I’m currently thinking a competitive frisbee club would be great or maybe something in the realm of my major,” he mused. The competitive frisbee club idea is typical for Krupansky, who serves as the Vice President of PALESTRA, a Ledyard High School organization that plans sports tournaments and holds an annual 5K Colonel Classic run to raise money for charitable causes.

He cites his high school classes as a major contributing factor in helping him realize what interests him and the kind of career he would excel at. In addition to Advanced Placement (AP) classes like calculus and Project Lead the Way (PLTW) courses, featuring a curriculum heavy on STEM, Krupansky has also taken Personal Finance and LHS’s shop classes (Woods and Metals). “These have definitely paved a road for me in the sense of what I would like to do,” Krupansky said.

“Mainly, the PLTW classes have done the best job of getting my feet wet, as they are college level classes geared towards engineering,” he added.

Upon hearing that he had received the scholarship, Krupansky was simply ebullient. “I honestly wasn’t expecting to get the scholarship, especially on the spot,” Krupansky explained. “The Air Force only gives out one per detachment, so I got really lucky. I was super ecstatic when they offered it to me. It felt unreal that I had a received a full ride through college. I still can’t believe that they’ve given me this opportunity.”

Krupansky is eager to use this opportunity to learn and grow at UCONN in the fall.

Carina Wang, Editor-in-Chief of Horizons

Senior Carina Wang is the Editor-in-Chief of the Horizons yearbook. She’s constantly writing, whether it’s National Honor Society newsletters or rapid-fire texts. She’s in a very serious relationship with her Google Calendar app and has love affairs with her own blog, the entire Starbucks franchise, and Pinterest. Her top three aspirations in life are to be fluent in French, stop starting 7-8 books at once and finishing none of them, and to get into Princeton University.