Vernon Hills senior Sam Kremerman said he likes to be challenged in school, and a check of his transcript confirms that. He took six Advanced Placement classes during his first three years of high school. He enrolled in five more AP classes this year.
Kremerman enjoys being pushed to think harder, he said, and that also occurs during his summer job as a caddie at Twin Orchard Country Club in Long Grove.
“A lot of members and players in general who I’ve caddied for are very knowledgeable people that I can always learn something from when talking to them,” Kremerman said.
Kremerman, a Vernon Hills resident, became a caddie at Green Acres Country Club in Northbrook in 2014 and spent two summers there. When the club closed, he moved to Twin Orchard in 2016. All those rounds — and conversations — paid off when he was awarded an Evans Scholarship, which covers the full cost of college tuition and housing.
According to the Evans Scholars Foundation website, the scholarships for caddies are awarded based on four criteria: caddie record, academic record, financial need and character.
Kremerman, who was a member of the Cougars’ track and cross country programs, plans to attend Illinois and major in economics. His AP Macroeconomics class helped him develop an interest in the field. He said he hopes to add a computer science minor.
He’s in a senior thesis class with computer science teacher Adam Lueken and is developing a card program “that takes blackjack to the next level,” according to Lueken. The program analyzes the exposed cards and provides a player with the probability of beating the dealer by hitting or standing.
“In this course, you have to be really motivated because the teacher isn’t spoon-feeding you,” Lueken said in an email. “You have to take complete control and design your project and learn as you would in the real world, using (software development platform) GitHub and Google. Sam is excelling in this course.”
In many ways, Kremerman is following in his older brother Slava’s path. He also caddied at Green Acres and earned an Evans Scholarship. A 2010 Northwestern graduate, Slava Kremerman went on to co-found his own company, Zen Educate, which uses computer science to help schools in England hire teachers and teaching assistants.
“I think the real cool thing about computer science is that the applications of it have just begun,” Sam Kremerman said. “There’s a lot of potential for it to be combined with a bunch of other fields and do a lot of great things for a lot of people.”
Fulfilling a dream: Ethan Lee said it has been his dream to attend Northwestern since eighth grade. In an advisory class at Stevenson the following year, Lee recalls that he wrote his goal down on paper.
“As the years went by, I started to realize tuition is a real thing, and college debt,” said Lee, who is now a senior. “I just didn’t know if it was going to happen.”
His family was already paying for his older brother, Brandon Lee, to attend Michigan.
All those worries vanished when Ethan Lee received an Evans Scholarship to Northwestern. The college scholarship for caddies covers the full cost of tuition and housing. He plans to study mechanical engineering.
Fellow Stevenson senior Andrew Slivka, a Lincolnshire resident and caddie at Riverwoods’ Ravinia Green Country Club, also earned the scholarship.
A Buffalo Grove resident, Ethan Lee said he remembers going to the driving range with his older brother and his dad, Mark Lee, when he was a child, and he didn’t like it. His ball didn’t go far or get off the ground.
However, he stuck with the game, and by sixth grade he had developed an interest in it, he said. The past two years, he played on the Patriots’ varsity team. He was a team captain in the fall.
Given Lee’s golf experience, a summer job as a caddie made a lot of sense. He started work at Sunset Ridge Country Club in Northfield two summers ago. The job had a huge payoff.
“It’s just indescribable,” Lee said of the scholarship to Northwestern.
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Ryan Nilsson is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Twitter @Pioneer_Press