FALL 2025 Ransom Everglades LOG 21 graduate school, so he made every effort to stay in touch. Not only did coming back to RE make perfect sense career-wise, but, according to Medina’s plans, at least, it had been a long time coming. Medina’s now decade-long relationship with Ransom Everglades began serendipitously, with a fateful meeting one day in 2012 at the Starbucks on Bayshore Drive. Medina was, at the time, a student at the Key Biscayne K-8 Center, where his mother is a long-time teacher. He had excelled in his elementary school, so much so that, upon reaching fourth grade, two of his teachers recommended he jump directly to fifth grade instead, which he did. A year later, then in middle school, Medina found himself again the big fish in a too-small pond. One of his teachers, Cliona Walshe-Crawford, knew then- Ransom Everglades middle school teacher Josh D’Alemberte and orchestrated a meeting between the two at the Bayshore Starbucks, where they quickly hit it off. A few weeks after meeting with D’Alemberte, a 10-year old Medina found himself telling faculty on a campus tour of the upper school that his main interest was “particle physics.” He submitted an application and, a few months later, learned he had earned a spot in RE’s rising sixth-grade class (the seventhgrade class he would have been eligible for had no available spots). He finished his remaining time in fifth grade at Key Biscayne K-8 and prepared for his days as a Raider. While Medina’s parents, like many of the 17 percent of Ransom Everglades students who receive financial aid, were initially concerned about whether they would be able to afford the tuition, their fears were quickly assuaged by the school’s generous financial assistance. Looking back, Medina said he was “fortunate to grow up in a household that valued education so much,” and that he had been excited, upon joining RE, to dive deeper into what he saw as a “neverending wellspring of things to learn” from RE’s stellar faculty. Paraphrasing astronomer Carl Sagan, he reminisced about how “there’s something magical about science when you’re a kid, when you’re learning to understand the world.” That excitement Medina has felt toward the sciences since his early years is what he hopes to convey to his RE chemistry students this year. It’s the kind of excitement that makes someone read countless Basher Science books (a formative part of Medina’s childhood), watch more Discovery Channel than Disney Channel and skip recess to study the periodic table, which Medina frequently did. “To some degree that was just me, and it was a little bit insane. I make no pretenses about that, you know? I was very self-motivated in that sense. No one was making me do that,” Medina said. “But I do think I was fortunate that my curiosity was sparked very young.” Teaching chemistry and helping spark a curiosity in chemistry, he said, have their challenges. The subject is often presented as incredibly difficult, “I’m very excited to ... try to make people see chemistry as exciting as I see it.” – Erik Medina ’21 Erik Medina ’21 shares a research poster on upcycling plastics Erik Medina ’21 received the middle school Ransom Cup from Greg Noblet
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