Dennis Ilmela ’17 joined Trinity-Pawling in the 10th grade after completing the mandatory 9 years of schooling required in Helsinki, Finland. “Somewhere during 8th grade, I had the idea that I should complete high school abroad. So during 9th grade, I was introduced to an agent who places Finnish students in North American schools and through them, I found out about Trinity-Pawling,” Dennis explained.
Dennis fit right into Trinity-Pawling’s diverse campus life, “I speak 5 languages – English, Finnish, and Spanish fluently, and also Swedish.” He also studied French for 5 years but couldn’t continue it due to his busy schedule at Trinity-Pawling.
Dennis loves sports and is a Trinity-Pawling tri-varsity athlete, playing football, golf, and wrestling. “I don’t really have a favorite sport – I’ve grown up playing pretty much every sport on the face of the earth and can’t pick one over the others.”
“Everything around you here is designed to make you the best possible you and your success is only limited by how willing you are to commit to this,” Dennis stated. Dennis enjoys math, but Spanish and Mr. McDougal’s history classes “take the cake.” He attributes his academic success to his “American mom,” Mrs. Carlin.
Dennis proudly described his Senior Independent Project that he completed earlier in the year. “I created a petition to allow the ACT to be taken in the state of New York in February. As of now, that isn’t possible because of an Admissions Testing Law. I was able to talk with a few state government members on how to draft a petition and Mr. Mead served as my mentor for the project. The amount of knowledge that I gained was unimaginable. Now only time will tell if the petition gets enough signatures so that we can propose this change to the state.”
“It’s quite hard to not enjoy working on the Senior Independent Project because we students get to choose exactly what we want to work on. Allowing us to work on something that we enjoy and want to pursue is, in my opinion, the best part.” Dennis concluded.