Celeste LaPlace is LR's Class of 2024 Valedictorian

Celeste LaPlace chooses challenges, an evident mindset that has put her at the front of her class at Lake Roosevelt High School, which she hasn't really seen much of for a couple years.

LaPlace is a Running Start student who will graduate from LR with both her high school diploma and a two-year college degree from Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake.

"I've been able to do two years of college for free," she noted when asked about the good and bad aspects of pursuing that tougher path.

She also had a paying job at Big Bend as a tutor in her major interest, chemistry, a subject she aimed at after tasting its challenge.

"It just made me suffer so much, I was like, 'I think this will be fun,'" she said. "... I wanted to do something that [involved] figuring out how things work and making a difference."

Despite the suffering, LaPlace is graduating with a 3.99 gpa.

Two possible areas of current interest are radioactivity and batteries. The direction toward electric vehicles presents a need for such research. But biochemistry would also interest her.

Academically inclined, she plans on getting an advanced degree, has an idea that a career in research would interesting, and she'd like to try being a professor at some point in her future.

She feels prepared now to enter a four-year school and will pursue her bachelor's degree in chemistry at Central Washington University.

She was not, however, prepared for Big Bend when she made that leap after a sophomore year at LR that had followed a year of online attendance during Covid.

"So, my first year I lost basically everyone I knew, and it was really a bad experience, socially," LaPlace said. "But, you know, I met more people at Big Bend, so I was able to make friends."

That immediate distancing from LR felt like it continued. She recently missed a senior class group photo, the rescheduling of which she found out only the night before. And she didn't go on the senior trip to Disneyland. "It was during one of my tests," she said.

Even so, her one year of in-person LR experience gave her the rock band class, some activities with the National Honor Society, and an algebra 3 class with Miss Peterson, who "really taught me to like math," LaPlace said.

She also enjoyed being a student representative on the school board her father serves on, but regrets having been too schedule-conflicted at college to attend those meetings for much of her senior year.

Asked what advice she would give to incoming freshmen, she was brief: "Don't get drunk," she said.

Celeste is the daughter of George and Cathy LaPlace.