Aiea Student To Study In Korea

Demie Grace Delos Santos

Aiea High School graduate and resident Demie Grace Delos Santos has been selected as a recipient of the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship.

Delos Santos will leave in the third week of February for her semester-long journey at private Soonchunhyang University in South Korea’s city of Asan.

“Students should study abroad no matter what their majors are,” said the 3-2 engineering student at Hawaii Pacific University.

Delos Santos first became interested in the engineering field in high school, when she took a mechanical drawing class.

“I thought it would be fun to be in the engineering field,” she said. “My subjects in math also helped nurture that passion.”

While mechanical drawing sparked her curiosity, she plans on diving into the more specific field of computer engineering.

In fact, Delos Santos was part of the Division II HPU team that took first place in the 2014 Pacific Northwest Regional ACM Programming Contest.

Her team, Team FF0000, also included visiting Norway students Chris Forberg and Christian Hunstad.

This was the first time Team FF0000 competed, but it managed to beat out schools from California, Canada and Hawaii.

Delos Santos has a passion for learning and experiencing other cultures, and she’s excited to begin her semester abroad.

“I look forward to making new friends and experiencing a different culture from mine,” she said.

The second recipient of the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is HPU’s international business student Hunter Hass of McCully, who will study at Mahidol University in Thailand.

Haas and Delos Santos bring the HPU total of Gilman scholarship recipients to six in the past two years.