TDHS valedictorian nabs top college admit

Larson is a valedictorian for the Class of 2021 at The Dalles High School. He also recently got accepted to his dream school, the prestigious Cal Poly (its clunkier full name is California Polytechnic State University).

But Larson is nothing if not practical. He also got accepted to the Oregon State University Honors College, and it makes more financial sense to go there, so that’s where he’s likely headed, at least for the first two years of college.

He lauded his ASPIRE mentor, Doug Nelson, who helped him navigate college and scholarship applications. “He helped steer me in the right direction; very wise individual with a very high intellect," said Larson.

While he is college-bound, Larson rejects the argument he said his generation has had drilled into them — that to be successful, you have to go to college. The price tag is too steep, he said, and students come out of it facing decades of debt.

“I think we need to stop with the idea that you have to go to college to be successful because that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. You can go into the trades and be immediately successful. You can go into the military and be successful.”

Larson describes himself as driven, saying he’s had a powerful work ethic “since I was super, super young. Probably something to do with how my parents raised me.”

His parents are Tiffany and Kurt Evans and Brent Larson.

Ever since he was little, he said, he wanted to “reach my potential. If I didn’t do the best I could, it would bother me.”

He’s learned to temper that, because it can veer into unhelpful perfectionism. “I do my very best to stay right underneath that: Doing my best, but I’ll let myself turn in an assignment late and get more sleep.”

Larson has known for years what he wanted to do with his life. He wants to become an astronautical engineer and start his own company making spacecraft. He’d name the company Larson Industries, after Stark Industries from the Iron Man movies.

Specifically, he’d like to “revolutionize the propulsion industry and what we use to travel through space.

“We use a bunch of liquid and solid fuel rockets and it’s just so primitive. It’s just what we’ve always used.

“To think of that: ‘Alright, I’m gonna fill this rocket with a bunch of flammable fluid and light it on fire and shoot it out the back end.’ That’s all a rocket is. You’d think we could do a little better at this point.”

He’s imagining possibilities with electric or nuclear power.

Space mining is a lucrative business idea, he said. “There’s this asteroid and it has enough gold on it to destroy the world economy, completely destroy it. It’s worth $700 quintillion and it’s called 16 Psyche. It has enough gold to give everyone on earth $93 billion. Each. That is an unfathomable amount of gold in that one asteroid.”

The moon has plenty of helium 3, an isotope used for medical applications. “Once we run out on earth, it’s like, ‘Oh well, guess we’re done.’ It’s that idea, ‘Look, there is so much out there that we can use, and we haven’t even tapped it.’ There are planets that rain diamonds.”

He’s always been mesmerized by space. He recounted years ago when NASA trained the powerful Hubble telescope on the darkest part of space and found a “baffling amount” of galaxies.

“There’s so many different worlds out there and it’s so crazy to me that there’s so, so, so many. You look up in the sky and you see all the stars, and a lot of them are galaxies and half of them don’t even exist anymore because the light’s still traveling.”

Larson gets asked a lot what it’s like to be smart. He believes people think kids with top grades “must be born incredibly smart.”

He allows that math comes easily to him, but said, “I’m terrible at history.” But he’s getting A’s in college-level Advanced Placement history classes “because I sit there and work my buns off.

“I think success in school has come from more of a drive and more this kind of want to succeed personally,” he said.

“I think anyone can succeed in school if they have the right environment and the right drive and I think a lot of kids give up early on because they dismiss themselves as not smart enough,” he said.

His secret to success is simple: Complete assignments and turn them in on time, and “you’re gonna do well in school.” And since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, “You don’t have to turn it in on time, you just have to turn it in. And kids are still failing classes. It couldn’t be any easier right now. At all. You cannot bring the bar any lower.”

He tells kids who don’t think they’re smart: “Look, you just haven’t found something you’re good at yet. Everyone has something they’re good at somewhere, which is looked over a lot of times.”

Larson was in elementary school when he realized he wasn’t thinking about things the same way his peers were. By the time people starting calling him an old soul, he’d long ago figured out he was one. He’s always enjoyed talking to adults and older people who were a lot smarter and a lot more experienced.

While he wouldn’t say he’s had to dumb himself down to fit in, he does think he’s had to tone down his maturity to fit in.

“I think I think differently than everyone else around me. I never in my life felt like I fit in with everyone around me,” he said.

By high school, he realized social skills were just another thing he could work hard on to improve. “I think it’s gotten a lot better now but that has just never ever come naturally for me.”

He has thought a lot about the social aspect of things, and he believes it is just as important as intellect. He bemoans that college applications probe about “what do you do for your community, but they never see the person.”

Larson is not just an academic. A longtime football player, Larson applies his hard-charging work ethic to the gridiron.

He’s broken six bones playing the sport and suspects “it probably has something to do with me going all in on everything.”

He got some interest from college football coaches, but “my mom was very happy that I didn’t want to play football in college.”

He just found out he was named a Second Team All-League wide receiver in football. “It was a pretty prestigious kind of accomplishment that I’ve never had before. That was sick.”

He’s also got an interest in finance.

When he turned 18 last August, he could finally invest in the stock market, something he’d wanted to do since he was 16. He’s doubled his modest investment so far.

He quickly bought stock in Moderna, before its COVID-19 vaccine got emergency use authorization from the U.S. government.

When he recently got the Moderna vaccine, “I was like, ‘I’m contributing to my own stock. This is cool.’”

Asked if he was on social media, Larson dropped a bit of a bombshell: “I’m TikTok famous. I had 50,000 followers on TikTok until I decided TikTok is very not worth it and empty, so I just kind of stopped.”

He did keep his Instagram account, which has 2,500 followers.

His Insta account is how he got discovered by The Option Agency, a Portland modeling agency, a few years ago. He’s done shoots for Nike, Fred Meyer and East Bay. The Nike shoot will be used internally by the company and won’t be released to the public.

Last summer, he got what would’ve been his “big break” to go down to California for a five-day shoot with a big-name company, but it got delayed because they didn’t have enough clothes, sourced from China, which was in lockdown because of COVID.

A rescheduled shoot was then canceled, again due to COVID.

The money from modeling is “stupid good,” Larson said, and he hopes to pay for most or even all of college with modeling gigs. “I’m staying in shape for myself, but there’s the idea, if you stay in shape, you’ll book more jobs.”

He also recently learned he won a four-year scholarship to OSU honors, and he’s a finalist in several other local scholarships.

He would never go into modeling as a career because “I know I would be so unfulfilled. You’re just valued based on your looks.”

He knows that whatever he does in life, “It can’t be easy, it has to be something — ‘OK, I’m using my brain, it’s difficult, it’s enjoyable to do.’”