Daga lives in Forest Hills, New York.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Indian American high school student Soham Daga was honored at a lavish ceremony on Capitol Hill last week, as a winner of the Congressional Award Gold Medal.
Daga, a 17 year-old from Forest Hills, New York, was awarded on Thursday along with 282 other recipients. The Congressional Award Gold Medal is given to selected youth between the ages of 13-and-a-half and 23, who have spent at least two years completing a minimum of 400 hours of community service, 200 hours of personal development and/or physical fitness, and a four-night excursion of their own choosing.
Daga was feted for his volunteer work with the Boy Scouts of America, with whom he partnered up with for service projects in and around New York City, particularly in Queens. He also organized a number of medical relief projects in India during his summers off from school. He was also the president of his high school’s digital photography club and policy debate team.
In addition, Daga is something of a whiz kid. He is a student at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, and is already enrolled at Princeton University. After graduating from high school this year, he will begin taking classes at the Ivy League institution, which is routinely ranked as the #1 school in the entire US.
Daga plans to major in financial engineering, and has already done extensive work in that field. He was a finalist for the Intel Science Talent Search, for a project he came up with in which he used data from Google Trends to track mortgage cycles and “develop a new model to predict the likelihood of mortgage delinquency,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which interviewed Daga in the video featured below.
At the Congressional Award Gold Medal ceremony, New York Congresswoman Grace Meng, Democrat, lauded Daga for his volunteer efforts and his commitment to making his community a better place.
“Soham is an exceptional young man who worked tirelessly to help others and achieve very challenging goals,” said Meng, who also tweeted a picture of herself with Daga and fellow Democratic New York Congressman Joe Crowley with the caption “Privileged 2 congratulate Soham Daga of #ForestHills for earning the Congressional Award Gold Medal. Congrats Soham!”
The Congressional Award was founded in 1979 to recognize outstanding volunteer and community service, and gives out Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels, as certificates and as medals – the latter is what Daga received. It is considered arguably the most prestigious volunteer and community service award given out in the US.