Student Spotlight: Akeim Phipps

This week we’d like to draw some attention to one of our Freshmen students, Akeim Phipps, who is in his second year with the program. Akeim originally came to us last year after his friend Deral Willis recommended the program to him. Unfortunately his first two tutors, Kyle and Jeremy were forced to end their involvement with the program after moving due to their careers. This year, Akeim has been working with first year Mike Ozmeral, Vice President of Reyes Holdings. Over the past few months, Mike and Akeim (pictured above) have spent a lot of time together working on homework, usually a mix of algebra and work from his computing class. They also play Scrabble and Upwords as a vocabulary building exercise, though Akeim prefers that they play Chicago, which is the best version of monopoly ever played, using famous landmarks from his hometown.

Akeim currently attends Prosser Career Academy where his favorite class is Spanish. He chose to enroll in Spanish because he finds it to be a far more useful language for his day to day life, certainly more so than French, his other option. Since his school is a career academy, he has the option of entering one of six selective career clusters, each with numerous specialties. He chose graphic design and will soon find out whether he is accepted or not. Akeim thinks that this will be useful for his dream career of video game designer/programmer. In fact, Akeim hopes to attend a technical school such as DeVry University upon high school graduation to further pursue his studies. Since he has been passionate about video games for a while, and is constantly thinking about new games or ways to improve games that are currently on the market, Akeim is very interested in potentially exploring this passion as a career. If he were to gain some video game development skills he has been working on some ideas for potential games that he’d like to design, including some improvements on the current Dragonball Z game and a brand new game based on a Japanese Anime series called Fighting Foodons.

Despite keeping a low profile at tutoring, Akeim had over 90% attendance last quarter. Akeim’s dedication to the program week-in and week-out resulted in a free trip to Six Flags this past summer where Akeim joined other students with excellent attendance last year for a full day of roller coasters, waterslides and arcade games last July. If he keeps up his great attendance this year, he’ll be able to attend our yearly trip once again. He has also taken advantage of additional enrichment opportunities such as a recent job shadowing day with Lawyer, Kate Pomper at her non-profit firm: Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. With this type of commitment to his future, we have no doubts Akeim is destined for excellence! Congratulations!