What is your name and grade? My name is Jacob Declaro and I’m a senior.

What activities are you involved in outside of school? On Tuesdays, I help lead the Climate Change Club and I’ve been the co-president of the organization since last year. Outside of school, I also spend my time working at Old Orchard Mall.

What is something about you that others may be surprised to learn? I run the Class of 2023 Instagram account (nilesnorth2023) with my friend Destiny. It’s a lot of fun and honestly, my friend Destiny just asked me randomly one day, “Hey, do you want to run this account with me?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.” I didn’t think it was gonna be that hard and it actually turned out to be a ton of fun. I felt like I could actually connect with everyone in my grade because they all felt so distant. Basically, I didn’t even know a lot of these people existed. There are about 500 of us in our grade, but I only knew like one percent of them. So it was kind of nice to reach out and connect with more people.

Which song best defines your personality and why? One song that I’ve been listening to a lot lately is Falling Behind by Laufey. She’s a really good artist. She just started blowing up recently and I’m really happy about that. I love how genuine she is with how she feels. A lot of other artists exaggerate their feelings but I feel like I can connect with her because she always makes her music relatable.

What is your favorite food that you would recommend to others and why? Actually, I have two foods in mind. This is gonna sound so weird, but for the first one, I would recommend a hot dog from Costco. It’s so good! I’m even going after school today to get one. For the second one, I would have to say Wingstop since they also have really good food.

Which teacher at Niles North has left the strongest impression on you and why? It’s kind of hard to pick because basically, the whole Science department left a big impact on me. I always connected really well with my science teachers. Right now, I have Mr. Kretsos and he’s the best. He’s amazing and everything makes sense with him. He even feels like a dad. Another teacher that left a big impact on me, who retired after last year, was Harry Kyriazes. He was the Chess Club sponsor and he was amazing too. Even though I didn’t really like his teaching style, he was very genuine and taught me a lot of valuable life lessons.

What is one major change you would like to see enacted at Niles North in future years? Honestly, [I would change] the way the school advertises things because a lot of stuff that they advertise isn’t good enough. Sometimes, I only find out about events months after they happen. Or sometimes they advertise things that aren’t really true. You know how our school’s motto is “Hate has no home here?” I’d say that’s not really accurate. It should be made more authentic.

Which college and major have you decided to pursue and why? I decided to commit to Loyola University in Chicago and I’m going for Environmental Science as my major and Chemistry as my minor. If I’m being honest, I had no idea that I had a passion for it until last year, which is really recent. That’s because I joined Climate Change Club, kind of on a whim. My friends were running it and it was literally just them two. Just two other people and me. So for the whole year, it was just the three of us having fun learning about science and Earth-related stuff, and seeing what we could do. Honestly, I think that’s where I figured out that I wanted to study Environmental Science. I just get to connect with a lot of people and with the environment.

What was your fondest high school memory? Honestly, there are so many I can think of. The one I remember most off the top of my head was when I went on this field trip for my Asian American Studies class and we went to Chinatown. We spent the whole day there and it was so much fun. I got to connect with a lot of people I was never really close with before and overall, it was really nice.

As a soon-to-be graduating senior, what key piece of advice would you give your freshman self? One thing that I would definitely tell my freshman self is that nothing really ends. Covid happened my freshman year, and I felt like that was the end of everything. I was like damn, I can’t even do stuff. But nothing really ends because things just keep going in different ways. Always change your perspective.