Ann Hunter-Pirtle was surprised.
She just graduated from college last year and hasn't had a lot of time to do much. In five or 10 more years, she would hope to have more interesting experiences to relate.
So it is when you do a five-year check-in with kids who graduated from high school in 2005.
But these students weren't typical. They were from what some teachers dubbed a "magical" class at Lincoln East High School -- the class most likely to succeed.
It included many high achievers: two presidential scholars, 17 Regents scholars, 10 National Merit semifinalists and 16 Nebraska distinguished scholars.
A national chess champion and state champions in speech, "We the People" and Science Olympiad were among them.
To get into the top half of that class, you had to have at least a 3.5 grade point average.
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From all this talent, the faculty chose seven students as the top of the crop.
They were collegial, outspoken and somewhat progressive.
They were multicultural and proud of it. They were environmentally conscious, and good thinkers.
They were Hunter-Pirtle, Halley Ostergard, Tim Carrell, Anish Mitra, Sasha Zheng, Nadia Bulkin and Nicko Fretes.
Hunter-Pirtle, described by her peers that year as "the little engine that could," was both leader and team member.
She graduated last year from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, majoring in political science and French. She spent her junior year in the south of France, all her classes in French.
"It felt very far away indeed, given that the dorm I lived in didn't have phones or Internet," she said. "In the end I made lifelong friends, had some amazing travel opportunities and came away with the sense that I could handle almost anything."
At UNL, she participated in speech, as she had at East, placing in the top 10 nationally four times. And she was named the first Theodore C. Sorensen Public Service Scholar her senior year and got to meet Sorensen, President Kennedy's speech writer and close adviser.
"Politics is still my passion and my dream, and given that Mr. Sorensen is one of my heroes, I couldn't believe that I not only got to meet him, but that the scholarship committee thought me worthy of the award," she said.
She's in eastern France now, working as an English teaching assistant in a middle school and high school to about 250 students between ages 13 and 25.
This fall, she will return to UNL to work on a master's degree in agricultural economics, which touches on the environmental impact of development decisions, development in poorer nations and world hunger issues, she said.
Halley Ostergard, the selfless, good-natured and lone conservative of the group, put a little distance between herself and Lincoln, with a freshman year in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews, where she made friends from all over Europe.
Her second year, she transferred to Middlebury College in Vermont, where she graduated last year with a degree in political science.
Oh, and she took a little time in October 2007 to come back to Nebraska to be crowned queen of Ak-Sar-Ben, with Tom Osborne her king.
Now she's working as a staff assistant in Sen. Ben Nelson's Lincoln office.
"I enjoy being back in Lincoln and having a job that allows me to work with Nebraskans for the betterment of our state," she said.
She's considering graduate school, but isn't sure exactly what her next step will be.
Tim Carrell, the logical, organized, math enthusiast, is back in Lincoln, too, waiting for his next move. But he is sure of what that is.
The mathematics major and chemistry minor who graduated cum laude last year from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and attended Harvey Mudd College, one in the group of Claremont colleges, is off to the University of Washington this fall to begin a five-year Ph.D. program.
He was also named a Microsoft scholar.
Eventually, he wants to be a math professor -- teaching and doing research.
For now, he's working at J.C. Penney Co. in Lincoln as a sales associate. Not doing much math, but enjoying himself just the same. He's also volunteering at Lighthouse as a math tutor.
Anish Mitra, who classmates said could end up doing anything -- president, mathematician, doctor, lawyer, musician -- got a degree in mathematics last year at Stanford University in California, and then stuck around another year to continue research on his honors thesis and pick up a master's degree in biophysics.
He carried on his love of debate as captain of the Stanford Debate Society from 2007 to 2009, and during that time won Stanford's first national championship in debate.
Next fall, he starts an M.D.-Ph.D. program at Washington University in St. Louis and hopes to get a doctorate in computational neuroscience.
"Essentially, I've discovered that my hobby is collecting degrees," he said.
Sasha Zheng, dedicated and somewhat perfectionistic, according to her friends, said in high school she had to have a career in which she could help others. Now she's in Milwaukee, attending the Medical College of Wisconsin, where she just completed her second year of medical school. She's studying to take Step 1 of her medical licensing exam at the end of June.
Then she will begin graduate school July 1 to work on a Ph.D. for three to five years in human and molecular genetics. When that's complete, it's back to medical school for a couple of years.
"I do not know yet which field of medicine that I want to pursue, but hopefully I will figure that out over the next few years," she said.
Nadia Bulkin majored in political science with minors in economics and environmental science at Barnard College in New York City.
"I did get to do quite a bit of traveling while I was in college, which was nice because it got me out of New York," she said, then added parenthetically: "I should have given more thought to where I went to college."
She spent a semester in Australia and did an internship with the U.S. State Department in Indonesia. And she has traveled to China to visit a friend.
While she enjoys political science, she has decided to take a couple of years away from it to focus on another love: fiction writing.
So she's working full time as a project assistant for an educational administration professor at UNL.
"I'm also writing horror stories and working on a post-apocalyptic novel set in Nebraska," Bulkin said.
But she'll go back to school for a master's in international affairs.
Nicko Fretes, known to the group to be passionate about everything, competitive and "our link to the outside world" because of his broad range of activities, including sports, graduated Thursday from Harvard University, cum laude in biochemical sciences with a foreign language citation in French.
He took a year off between his junior and senior years to work on an ethanol project he started over a summer in Lincoln.
"The time off also served to knock out some pre-med course requirements and, more generally, refresh my mind and body," he said.
Now he is applying to medical schools to begin in the fall 2011 and in the meantime will work as an emergency medical technician, travel and ski as much as possible.
"But right now, I cannot stop obsessing about the World Cup that begins in 12 days and Argentina's chances in it," he said.
So will the state of Nebraska lose this segment of the best and brightest to other parts of the country and the world?
No one would commit to where they might end up, but a few were realistic about the chances they would ever return home.
Hunter-Pirtle dreams of living in different cities: Montreal, Buenos Aires, London, Boston, San Francisco.
"If I had to bet money on it, I predict that I would end up somewhere in the Midwest, though not necessarily Nebraska, and hopefully doing a fair amount of international travel," she said.
Bulkin does not plan to stay in Nebraska.
"But I also have no idea what the future holds, so who knows?"
Zheng is getting pressure from her parents to do her medical residency in Nebraska.
"At least for the next five years I will still be in the cheese and beer state," she said.
Carrell will go where the university teaching jobs are.
And Mitra loves Nebraska, but he, too, is not sure it has the careers he is pursuing.
"That said, who knows? To this day I never get any work done on Saturdays in the fall because I hunker down in front of a TV or online radio to catch the Husker football games."
Fretes also loves Nebraska, more now than when he left five years ago, he said, and expects to live here again.
"However, I must admit that I am not restricting my medical school search to only UNMC or Creighton," he said. "More than anything, I am anxious to see as much of the world as possible, for with each new experience I come to learn something I overlooked about our home, and thus about myself."
Reach JoAnne Young at 402-473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
