Laguna Blanca School alumna Cameron Platt has been selected as valedictorian of Princeton University’s Class of 2016.
The Princeton faculty accepted the nominations of the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing at its April 25 meeting.
Platt, an English major, will deliver the valedictory address at Princeton’s Commencement ceremony on May 31.
After she graduates, Platt, who is also earning a certificate in theater, will spend the summer working on a theater production to be presented at the New York International Fringe Festival.
She then will attend the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, on her way toward an academic career. Her studies already have taken her to Oxford, where she participated in the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English and did research in the Bodleian Library during the summer of 2015.
Platt earned the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence in her sophomore year and was the co-winner of the George B. Wood Legacy Junior Prize for exceptional achievement during the junior year. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in fall 2015.
She has received an English departmental prize annually since the spring of her freshman year, including the Class of 1870 junior and senior sophomore prizes, and the Class of 1870 Old English Prize. She has twice been recognized for Outstanding Work in the Program in Theater.
As an actor, director and in other production roles, Platt has worked on more than 30 theatrical productions. She is president of the Princeton University Players, the university’s student-run musical theater company. She is a peer academic adviser in Wilson College and a member of the undergraduate advisory committee in the English department.
Platt attended Laguna Blanca from grade seven through 12, and is fondly remembered for her many appearances on the stage in Spaulding Auditorium and for her extraordinary performance in the classroom, where she racked up a number of awards, including the Math Prize as a junior, before heading off to Princeton.
Click here for more information about Laguna Blanca School, a nonprofit EK-12 co-educational, college preparatory day school with campuses in Hope Ranch and Montecito.
— Tara Broucqsault is director of communication at Laguna Blanca School.