Admitting that summer is over is probably one of the hardest things to do. Once September rolls around and school gets back into session, it’s sometimes easy to forgot about all of the amazing things we accomplished this past solstice. However, some HHS students may have a hard time forgetting their incredible summers.

From saving lives, to attending major conferences, to building houses for the needy, these few HHS students had the summer of their lives.

Freshman Austen Hancock went to Jenkinson’s Boardwalk in Point Pleasant one hot day in early August with family and friends. He expected to have a normal beach day, but soon found himself saving the life of a little boy. Hancock was swimming in the ocean with his family, when all of a sudden a big wave came and knocked a little boy into him. The boy was around 4 or 5 years old and got right back up after wiping out into Hancock. Hancock saw it as nothing more than an awkward encounter in the ocean.

Moments later, however, Hancock noticed the boy getting sucked back into the ocean, struggling to swim. The boy was essentially drowning and Hancock was the only one who seemed to notice. So, Hancock rushed to the boy, simply picked him up, and handed him to his mother who was standing along the shoreline.

Upon saving the boy from drowning, Hancock had only one thought on his mind. “Why did that mom let her kid swim in the ocean by himself…?” Hancock said. That’s a very good question, Mr. Hancock.

Speaking of saving lives, juniors Chelsea Chin and Gina Clementi, as well as senior Samantha Levonaitis, attended the Future Medical Leaders of America Conference at the end of June. The three day event took place in Boston where students who aspire to take a career in the medical field were educated on a variety of different things.

One of the highlights of the experience was being able to watch a live stream of a surgeon making a hip transplant on a person. The students were able to ask the surgeon questions via the live stream, and the surgeon would then answer the questions while doing the procedure. Hopefully, the patient getting the hip transplant was okay with this!

“I gained the knowledge of all the different medical fields and gained a different perspective of what I want to do in the future,” Chin said. Chin’s words supports that this summer experience was truly worthwhile.

While Chin, Clementi, and Levonaitis were training to help people in the future, senior Victoria Rivera already got a head start this past summer. Rivera went on a service trip with her youth group, Catholic Heart Workcamp, to Paterson, New Jersey.

Rivera and her group teamed up with Patterson’s Habitat for Humanity and spent a week building houses for low income families. So, while most of us laid out trying to get a good tan this past summer, Rivera was busy building houses for the needy, enough said.

Don’t feel too bad if your summer didn’t contain saving a life, learning about the medical field, or building houses for a community in need. I’m sure everyone has some sort of exciting story to share from this past summer! However, these HHS students went above and beyond with their not-so-typical summer vacations.