Following four years of commitment, perseverance, and risk taking, senior Kaylee Bulat has been recognized as the class of 2025 salutatorian. With no regrets, Bulat spent her time at WA doing what she loved and finding ways to expand her horizons.
She has committed to Boston College and will be majoring in biology come fall. Eventually, Bulat hopes to enter medical school and become a doctor. She has channeled these passions into HOSA and is aiming to get her EMT certification. As she describes it, this career is a perfect combination of her two priorities: science and helping others.
Bulat has spent her time at WA constantly challenging herself and taking risks, whether that’s in AP Chemistry or teaching herself how to bake. Despite her consistently rigorous workload, she expresses how a genuine interest in learning has motivated her.
The Ghostwriter had the opportunity to sit down with Bulat, learning more about her both inside and outside of the classroom.
Q: What’s your perfect idea of happiness?
A: I would say just being surrounded by people that love and support me, and being able to also reciprocate that and support those people as well.
Q: What’s your greatest fear?
A: Honestly, for a less serious answer, probably being buried alive. I used to have nightmares about that all the time when I was a kid. But for a more serious answer, probably accidentally hurting someone that I care about.
Q: Which living person do you most admire and why?
A: It’s kind of a cliche answer, but probably my mom. She’s the most hard working person that I know, but she also has a really positive outlook on life, which I admire, and I really hope to be more like that.
Q: What’s one piece of advice you would give to younger students?
A: I would say that the purpose of school is to learn. I think a lot of people — and I struggled with this too — get really wrapped up in the grades and the GPA and that kind of thing. But if you approach school with a learning attitude and you try to really be present in class, you’re gonna get a lot more out of it. […] I think over time I realized I was kind of miserable in school, and I didn’t really know why. When I started trying to focus less on the numbers and more on what I was actually learning, it was a lot easier to feel happy, because I felt like I was getting something important out of it.
Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement?
A: Not really one specific thing, but one of my major activities that I’ve been involved with has been art, and I haven’t really had any specific education in art, so I’ve had to self teach myself over the years, and it is a slow process, but I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve managed to come just by myself.
Q: If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be and why?
A: Maybe like a bird of some kind. Birds remind me of freedom, and I think it would be so cool to look out on the world from above, from the sky and explore.
Q: What’s your most marked characteristic?
A: I would say that I’m a thoughtful person, in the sense that I like to learn new things and hear new perspectives, and that really interests me.
Q: What is one regret you have from high school?
A: I don’t really have any regrets. I don’t like to look back on things with regret. I like to see it as “I make a mistake, but it’s an opportunity to learn.”
Q: What was the most memorable class you took in high school and why?
A: I would definitely say AP Chemistry. It was pretty challenging, but it was really interesting. […] A lot of the labs we did were pretty crazy. Me and my partner once got to handle fully concentrated sulfuric acid, which is kind of scary because if you spill it it will burn right through your skin. But it was definitely memorable.
Q: What is your favorite memory from high school?
A: This isn’t specifically in high school, but last year over April break my family took a trip to Disney World, and it came at the perfect time. It was a couple weeks before AP exams, and [during] junior year, it kind of felt like my whole life depended on my scores. So it was really nice to go on that trip and to have a chance to breathe and relax.
Q: What teacher has had the largest impact on you?
A: I would say Mrs. Hart. She was my English teacher this year and last year. English has never really been my strong subject. I’ve kind of struggled with it the most out of all my classes. But I really love how she has been able to make connections between what we’re reading and real, relevant issues. She’s made me more confident with approaching essays and analyzing literature. But I think she’s also made me more confident with approaching actual relevant current events.
Q: How do you maintain work and personal balance in your own life?
A: When you’re studying and working on homework, there’s a certain point where doing more isn’t going to be better. I find it really important to try to study efficiently. Or if there’s a problem on your homework that you don’t know how to do, for me it’s better to just leave it there and go try to get help the next day. I think spending hours and hours on things a lot of times isn’t that helpful.
Q: What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
A: Someone told me once that it’s better to try something and fail than to not try at all, because at least if you try and fail you’ve learned something, so you’re still better off than if you didn’t try at all, and I think that really helped me change my perspective, because I spent a lot of my life being really afraid to do new things, and that’s really helped me realize that it’s always good to take a risk if you can.
Q: What’s one quality that you admire in others?
A: I really admire when people are able to be honest. I know it’s something that I struggle with, being able to own up to your mistakes, say sorry when you were wrong. So I really hope to be more like that.
Q: What is a challenge that you’ve overcome?
A: When I was really little, I had super bad separation anxiety, specifically from my mom. So that made kindergarten and first grade really, really difficult for me, but it was also really hard on my family. But over the years of elementary school, I was slowly able to work past it, and even though I don’t struggle with it at all today, some of the lessons that I learned from that still sit with me. I used to do these breathing exercises every single night before I went to bed, and I still use that today even though I don’t really struggle with the same issues anymore.
Q: What’s something that gives you hope?
A: Just seeing people that are able to be kind. The world is kind of a confusing, terrible place sometimes. And seeing people who are able to hold the door for someone else, or give someone a compliment even when they’re having a bad day, that really gives me a little bit of hope.
Q: What’s one thing you think people should know about you that they probably don’t?
A: I used to want to be an actress, actually, which I think not a lot of people know about me. When I was in elementary school, I tried out for the school play, and I was Wendy in Peter Pan. I ended up giving up on that dream pretty quickly, though, which is why I think not a lot of people know.
Q: What would you like people to remember you for?
A: I just want to be someone that leaves the world a little bit better than I came into it. I don’t need to save the world or anything like that, but I’d like to be able to help at least a few people.
Q: What is a hobby of yours that when you do it, you lose track of time?
A: There have actually been a few times where I did lose track of time freshman year. When I was a little less concerned about my health and my sleep schedule, there were a few times I stayed up till three in the morning drawing because I didn’t realize it was so late.
Q: If you could bring three things to a deserted island, what would they be?
A: I always think about this from an actual survival perspective. So I think I would want some kind of phone, but a satellite phone or something that works even on a deserted island, so I can hopefully get rescued pretty quickly. I don’t think I’m gonna make it that long otherwise. Then I would say a water purifier or something, and maybe matches to start a fire for warmth and also cooking food.
Q: What’s the toughest decision you had to make in high school?
A: Pretty simple, but probably just the decision of where to go to college. There was a lot more to that choice than I originally thought. My perspective on it earlier was always, “Well, if you get into your dream school, why would you not just go there?” But with financial aspects and questions about “How close is it to home? How good are the resources for your specific major?” There’s a lot more research that ends up going into that choice than I originally realized.
Q: What does being named salutatorian mean to you?
A: I am really shocked that I got it. I’m obviously really grateful, really honored, but it was definitely not something I was expecting because it was never really a goal of mine. Some of my classmates started bringing it up around junior year that I might have the potential, but I never really took it seriously because it was never in the front of my mind. But I’m definitely really grateful and proud of myself.
Q: What song, movie, book, or TV show best defines who you are as a person?
A: I would say I really like the song “Out of the Woods” by Taylor Swift. There’s this one line where she says, “The monsters turned out to be just trees.” I kind of live my life by that idea, that things might seem scary, but they’re probably not as scary as they seem in the moment. And if you never take a risk and go out and try something, you’ll never know.
Q: Being recognized as salutatorian is a huge achievement; tell me about one time where you didn’t succeed.
A: So not really a school related thing, but there was a while where I really wanted to get into baking and cooking, and I thought to myself, “You can’t really be bad at that sort of thing.” I was definitely wrong. I made a batch of brownies one time, and I was sneakily watching [a family member] eat one of them, and they spit it in the trash because it was so bad. But that just motivated me more. I was like, “I have to prove that I can be good at this.” So I just started baking something new every single week, and eventually I managed to make a nice batch of fancy French macarons.
Q: What made you realize that Boston College was the right place for you?
A: I realized the first time I visited there. My family was just taking me around to a bunch of college campuses last summer, and we visited BC, and it just kind of felt right. I don’t really know how to describe it, like the campus, the way that the students and staff described it, it just felt like a place where I would belong. I didn’t really tell anybody that, though, because I didn’t think I would get in. But I was so happy when I did.
