Student-Athlete Of The Month: Amberlynn Gong

Wake up. Go to school. Head home. Do homework. Submit scholarship applications. Go to school team practice, then straight to club team practice. Get home at 9:00pm. Do more homework. Oh, and somewhere in there, eat and sleep.

Where most folks might get tired just looking at that to-do list, Severna Park senior Amberlynn Gong not only embraces it, but she excels at all of it.

In the pool, Gong is part of two swim teams — Severna Park High School and the Naval Academy Aquatic Club (NAAC). She helped the Falcons win the girls county championship, a meet at which she broke the school’s 200 individual medley record and also won the 100-yard breaststroke. For NAAC, of six events where she qualified for finals, she won the 100 butterfly at the club state meet and finished second in the 200.

Outside of competition, she’s the treasurer for Severna Park’s Student Government Association (SGA) and the class of 2025, a member of three national honor societies (NHS, Spanish National Honor Society, and Mu Alpha Theta), and owner of a pristine GPA (4.0 unweighted, 4.58 weighted) with an acceptance letter from MIT.

At her heart, she’s a gifted swimmer with a knack for numbers who wants to use her experiences to help people, both in and out of the pool.

“To swim in college has been one of my main goals since freshman year,” Gong said. “I started reaching out to a bunch of schools that I knew would challenge me in the pool and academically. I really like putting in the work, and beyond that, I like having the supportive environment around me.

“Everyone I know who’s a swimmer is in the same boat. We all wake up early, go through the four-hour training days, and we're all going through it together. I love how everyone is just acknowledging each other's effort and supporting them.”

Beyond being a standout swimmer, Gong has loved math, music and Spanish for as long as she can remember. Though her earnest piano playing days are perhaps done, she worked with Severna Park’s SGA to take some musically inclined classmates to a local nursing home and play Christmas songs during the holiday season. In addition to tutoring in the Hispanic community locally, she also hopes to use her love of mathematics to get an economics degree at MIT to make the world a better place.

“I’ve always really liked math, so I took AP Economics at school, and I really enjoyed how it applies to a bunch of different aspects of life,” Gong said. “I didn’t think about it as a major until I did an internship with the Anne Arundel Economic Development Corporation, and that really piqued my interest and made me want to pursue it further.”

Gong will swim at MIT and is leaning toward majoring in developmental economics, which studies how low- and medium-income countries and locations can emerge and improve their economic state. It’s a complex field with dozens of factors at play, which perhaps yields some familiarity for Gong. Her preferred swim event is the butterfly, generally considered the most physically demanding discipline in swimming on account of the myriad components associated with successful technique.

“It has a lot of moving parts, and it’s also very difficult in terms of how tired it makes you. I actually wrote my college essay about that,” she said. “I think it’s made me very resilient and mentally tough, which is something all my coaches have emphasized. Being mentally tough has really helped me in overcoming challenges in life.”

That experience both in Severna Park High School, in the community at large, and part of the supportive swimming community is something Gong will hold to as she applies her studies at MIT.

“One thing about MIT is that they really value their collaborative culture and their ability to balance things. And one thing about Severna Park High that's helped me a lot is the ability to balance all of my things: AP classes, school sports, and clubs,” she said. “Being around a class of super talented people has taught me to collaborate with the best and become a great team player and overcome challenges together.”