Nicholas Johnson Is Princeton’s First Black Valedictorian In It’s 274-Year History

Nicholas Johnson has made history being named Princeton’s first Black valedictorian in its 274 year history.

The coronavirus pandemic has created a new normal for students and educators, changing the dynamic on learning environments. 

The class of 2020 has especially endured their fair share of hardships over the last few months, but still, they persevered and made it to the finish line.

As college graduates celebrate this exciting chapter of their lives, Princeton University graduate Nicholas Johnson is celebrating a major milestone and accomplishment of his own.

The university revealed Johnson made history for the class of 2020 and Princeton being named the school’s first Black valedictorian.

Johnson, an operations research and financial engineering major, is also the first valedictorian in his department’s 21-year history, according to the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

During his undergraduate studies, Johnson was an accomplished scholar serving as a writing fellow at Princeton’s Writing Center, a residential college adviser for Whitman College, and worked as a software engineer at Google’s California headquarters during his senior year.

Johnson’s time at Princeton also led to international opportunities in the form of cultural immersion trips to Peru, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.

Outside of his academic endeavors, Johnson also expressed his appreciation for the close bonds he formed with his fellow classmates.

“My favorite memories of my time at Princeton are memories of time spent with close friends and classmates engaging in stimulating discussions — often late at night — about our beliefs, the cultures and environments in which we were raised, the state of the world, and how we plan on contributing positively to it in our own unique way,” Johnson said, according to Princeton University.

Post-graduation, Johnson will intern this summer as a hybrid quantitative researcher and software developer at the D. E. Shaw Group before he begins his Ph.D. studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall.

Along with his concentration in operations research and financial engineering, he is pursuing certificates in statistics and machine learning, applied and computational mathematics, and applications of computing.