Graduating Ferndale, Berkley seniors ready for next academic challenge

FERNDALE/BERKLEY — The end of the school year is rapidly approaching, as senior students are preparing to graduate from high school and head into the “real world.”

Students in Ferndale Public Schools and the Berkley School District will receive their diplomas within the next couple of weeks, and as they do, they will head off to get jobs or continue their educations at colleges or trade schools.

For Ta’Shaya Bolling-Woods, of Detroit, she will be continuing her studies at the University of Michigan to study computer science.

Bolling-Woods, 17, will be graduating from University High School with a 4.0 GPA. She also was a member of the National Honor Society, National Technical Honor Society, her student council and was a student of the year at Oakland Schools Technical Campus, where she studied computer programming.

“I’ve been programming for about six years now,” she said. “I started in seventh grade, and it’s just been something I’ve been doing for a while. … I’ve actually been a straight-A student my whole K through 12 career. So, it’s kind of just natural to me.”

Bolling-Woods credited her parents, Theresa Bolling and Alex Woods, for helping push her in her studies.

“They pushed me to strive to be great,” she said. “I was always (with) my head in the books. I’m a reader. I love learning new things and whatnot. So, it was just fun to me.”

While Bolling-Woods knows she wants to pursue computer science and possibly software and development, she isn’t sure yet what she wants to do with her studies and plans to figure that out during her time in Ann Arbor.

The future Wolverine said her departure from high school is a bittersweet one, but she’s ready to move on and do something different in her life.

“Every year I used to tell my dad how worried I was for the next upcoming school year, but this time I think I’m actually ready to start this next chapter,” she said.

At Berkley High School, Zeinab Erreghaoui, of Southfield, will be graduating and heading to Michigan State University to study international relations and premed.

Erreghaoui, 18, is the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, a fact which influenced the direction of her future collegiate studies.

“Where they’re originally from, it’s kind of hard for them to access health care,” she said. “Stuff like that we just access here in America that we have the privilege to have. I feel like it kind of got me involved and really passionate to go into international relations, because it can help me travel to the Middle East or Africa and help those people that are impoverished and less fortunate compared to us in America. I feel like me studying international relations is definitely going to give me that opportunity to help make a change.”

Erreghaoui finished her high school career strong with a 3.7 GPA, but she wasn’t always getting straight A’s and said she had a rough start at the beginning of high school.

“Freshman year, I just kind of fell into, I would say, the wrong crowd and I was really just focusing on friendships and hanging out and doing things that wasn’t really important,” she said. “I didn’t fail or anything. It’s just I didn’t get straight A’s like I do now. That kind of stuff just set me back and caused my GPA to plummet down.”

Erreghaoui said her family’s support helped her focus her priorities to become a better student.

The incoming Spartan said leaving Berkley involves a “bunch of mixed emotions,” as she is both nervous to be creating her own schedule and doing work without her parents’ support, but also excited to be on her own.

“I am nervous about how I’m going to tackle down a bunch of college work and just (doing) chores myself, but I am really excited to be on my own and get that sense of adulthood,” she said.