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Hernandez plans to attend Cornell University in January 2016. During the month of May, Hernandez satisfied her “senior internship” requirement at Neighbors Link.
At Hackley, seniors take a month off school and do a service project instead. Hernandez's project at Neighbors Link is setting up a lending library to encourage adult literacy in English and encourage parents to read to their bilingual, bicultural children. The books have been donated through collections done by a partnership with Game Changers – a start-up nonprofit that selected Neighbors Link to receive books from their annual book drive.
She is the daughter of Russell and Alessandra Hernandez. Her father is an NL board member and also owns his own residential construction firm and co-owns the Bedford Post Inn. He and his wife are active in many local community organizations in their hometown of Pound Ridge.
Serena Hernandez is fluent in Spanish and English and has participated in her school’s other service projects at Neighbors Link, including a presentation at the worker center this past winter.
She started volunteering at Neighbors Link in the summer after her ninth-grade year at their Summer Links program. This summer will be her third year at Summer Links – she usually is assigned to a preschool or first grade class.
She has used internships to explore career paths – and is sure she wants to work with small children – preschool to first grade or so. She will be attending the Human Ecology School at Cornell – majoring in human development.
For the fall, she plans to divide her time working at a family friend’s school in Puerto Rico and then working at her aunt’s school in Italy where she hopes to add Italian to her language repertoire.
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