TAMPA — When you picture a typical class valedictorian, you imagine someone buried in textbooks, running on caffeine and anxiety and turning every group project into a solo mission.
Shruti Mishra? She also brought home a homemade coffee mug.
“That’s exactly what I made,” she said, laughing.
Mishra, Wharton’s Class of 2025 valedictorian, found success not just by burying her head in a textbook (though her 8.31 GPA says she did a lot of that as well), but by mastering something a lot of high-achievers struggle with: balance.
For Mishra, that meant slipping a ceramics class between the stress of Advanced Placement and dual enrollment courses. It meant laughing a little when you failed at making a ceramic box (“mine kind of fell and got lopsided,” she confessed). And it meant allowing her creative side, which includes a bedroom full of Legos and her paintings and drawings, a little breathing room.
“I needed filler classes, like breaks in between my hard classes,” she said. “And that really helped me.”
Of course, Mishra took more than her share of tough courses. From Heritage Elementary to Benito Middle, and then her freshman year at King before transferring to Wharton, she chased academic rigor.
But she learned, sometimes the hard way, that rigor without rest is a recipe for burnout.
“There were some semesters I didn’t leave the house,” she said. “I feel like my high school experience was regular. I was having fun. But then there were certain semesters where I took way too many classes, before I learned that balance.”
The first semester of her junior year was particularly tough.
“First semester, I was taking 11 classes for some reason, and they were all, like, dual enrollment, Florida Virtual School, Advanced International Certificate of Education, AP, and that was bad,” she said.
Her first semester of senior year tested her as well, thanks to a trio of hurricanes that ran through the area.
With much of Tampa in the dark after Hurricane Milton, including her New Tampa home, her dual enrollment assignments piled up.
Meanwhile, at Burger 21, where Mishra works, other families also lacking power came looking for food.
“I couldn’t do any of my online homework, and it was a lot,” she said. “And since nobody had any power, everybody was going out to eat, so they needed all of us at work. That was a pretty tough week.”
But tough times is when Mishra was able to lean on her people. She gave a shout out to teachers at Wharton like her calculus instructor John Viola and marketing teacher Tina Roberts, as well as her guidance counselor Tommy Tonelli for helping her conquer any academic hurdles.
Her parents, mother Mridula Sharma and father Anil Mishra, continued to encourage her to challenge herself. Her brother, Nikhil, talked her into transferring from King, where he had graduated from, knowing it might not be a great fit for her.
And her core friend group, academic overachievers just like her dating to elementary school, formed a study support group that landed four others in the Class of 2025’s Top 10.
But that didn’t stop come classes from becoming roadblocks, like AP Physics. Mishra said it was the toughest class she took in high school.
Needless to say, AP Physics II never made it onto her schedule.
“After that I was done,” she said with a chuckle.
Her favorite class? Calculus, thanks to Viola, who she says made the material click when sometimes she couldn’t figure it out by herself.
In the fall, Mishra will join her brother in Gainesville. At the University of Florida, she plans to follow in the family tradition of her parents and brother by majoring in computer science, though she’ll go in with an open mind.
She knows her next academic chapter will be more intense, but she’s ready for it.
But first, summer.
Because if high school taught Mishra anything, it’s that no matter how many advanced classes you stack on a schedule, you have to leave room for doing things you enjoy, like hanging out with friends, playing a few video games here and there and maybe even tackling another ceramics project.
