Heydi Linares
This spring, Miami Palmetto High School rising senior Heydi Linares won the Palmetto Core Value Award at the end-of-the-year awards ceremony.
She’s committed to community service and volunteers at a variety of events, some through Key Club and some through the Savannah Sanin’s organization, Mockup Speak Up.
As the Key Club co-secretary she deals with communication with board members and makes sure club members are up to date with their community service hours.
“Everyone is supposed to have 10 hours a month,” she says.
She’s a peer leader in Mockup Speak Up.
“I advise people who have trouble speaking (in public),” she says. “Savannah has activities where everyone socializes and gets out of their comfort zone.”
She’s been a member since Sanin told her about the Gold Award idea.
“Like a good friend would do, I helped her,” she says. “I really like socializing. I’m very good at schmoozing. It’s very easy to find a topic to talk about.”
Mockup Speak Up had individual sessions once every two weeks. The final session was held at the Girl Scout owned Camp Mahachee.
Linares earned many of her hours her freshman year when she worked with the athletic training department at Miami Killian. As a trainer, she worked at all sport events and practices.
“I loved it a lot,” she says. “It involved medicine that is something I’m interested in for my future career. The best thing is being able to bond with all the other athletic trainers.”
She couldn’t continue when she transferred to Palmetto from Killian so she could take the Capstone program.
This past year, Linares completed her research paper on how socio-economic status affects the perception of health care quality.
“During that time, I had just shadowed a doctor,” she says. “He was telling me how socio-economic status can affect how people perceive medical technologies and if they were to use them. That is what I found in my study as well. Someone who is rich looks at health care differently than someone who is poor. Rich people can go to the doctor. Poor people can’t go.”
She says in the future, she wants to help increase access to people who aren’t financially stable.
“I’m very happy and blessed to have what I have,” she says. “The treatment they get is not the treatment that they are supposed to be receiving.”
She had shadowed a cardiologist who specializes in robotic surgery at Baptist Hospital for a day and saw a full surgery.
“He does open heart surgery,” she says. “The one I shadowed was the mitral valve surgery. You have to repair that valve when it’s not pumping out blood correctly. I saw everything. I expected to be in a viewing room. They don’t have that.”
Linares is the Class of ’27 secretary and a new member of the National Honor Society. She is also a member of the Debate Club.
“That is a club that I really like a lot,” she says. “I’m not a debate person. I tried it and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m more medical, science.”
She did well in debate. In her first competition at Miami-Dade College, she placed second. She plans to attend more competitions this school year.
In college, she says she’s considering majoring in Bio Medical Engineering.
She plans to stay in state so she’s applying to Florida State University, the University of Florida, the University of Central Florida, the University of South Florida and Florida International University.
This summer she’s been interning at Palmetto in the school office.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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