- June 22, 2025
Seabreeze graduating senior Wade Rogers once thought his dream school was out of reach.
But two teachers changed his perspective — and now, come fall, Rogers will be a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
And it all started with his former chemistry teacher, Robert Hernandez. One day, he came into his classroom and noticed Hernandez had a University of Miami shirt on. As Rogers was considering the school as a possibility, he started asking him questions.
"He was like, 'Why are you looking at Florida schools? You should be trying to go to MIT and Stanford,'" Rogers recalled. "His kid went to Stanford. ... That was the first time I was like, 'If his kid went to Stanford and he thinks I can do it, then I'll try.'"
As a kid, Rogers spent a lot of time on MIT's Scratch website, which provides children with a free coding community to create digital stories, games and animations. When he started applying to colleges, and now had MIT on his mind as a real possibility, he started reading blogs written by current students.
He discovered he liked the culture and the tight-knit nature of the school. Plus it's close to a large body of water.
"Since I've been in Ormond my whole life, I've always had the river to look at, and I've had the ocean just over there," Rogers said. "So it's kind of a funny thing that I always wanted to have a big body of water to see."
Then, his calculus teacher, Todd Huckaby, helped make MIT a reality by introducing Rogers to the QuestBridge program, which connects high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds with scholarship opportunities.
Rogers has experienced sickness in his family, leading him to transfer from Spruce Creek High School's IB program in the middle of his sophomore year. While that was out of his control, his academics, he said, weren't.
Rogers will be the first person in his family to attend college. He hopes to become an engineer.
"Everything I wanted to do, every endeavor I would go after, he would support me," Rogers said of Huckaby. "I feel like he recognized the importance of just jumping after opportunities."
That falls in line with Rogers' mantra for his high school years: Minimizing regrets.
When he got to Seabreeze, he joined the school's Digital Design career academy and later became part of the yearbook committee. He was webmaster his junior year and then, for his senior year, was named co-editor-in-chief.
Last summer, he also participated in the Florida State University Young Scholars Program, spending six weeks taking classes in programming, math and science, as well as working in the school's eHealth Lab for the program's research project. Rogers and the other interns worked on a patient portal that used artificial intelligence to help patients better understand diagnostics.
So his advice for high school students?
"Recognize that you have these four years and then once they're done, it's going to shape the rest of your life," Rogers said. "Because of what I did in high school, now I get to go to MIT."
