Whatever Happened to Catherine Huang?

A Westinghouse finalist, one of USA Today's Top 20 High School Seniors and a Presidential Scholar, Catherine K. "Cat" Huang '98 sounds like a remarkable, albeit stereotypical, Harvard academic.

But despite a resume that boasts a perfect SAT score, Huang was known among many of her classmates not as a scholar but as a beauty queen.

The winner of the Miss Delaware Teen USA title in 1993, Huang was one of several in her class who had won beauty pageants, modeled, or performed in commercials. But what made Huang stand out more than anyone was that when she hit the campus, everyone knew it.

Huang says that as a first-year, she went out five to six times a week, frequented final clubs and dated several guys.

"I was really excited to go to Harvard and friends have always been a very important part of my life." Huang says. "Therefore, I tried to get to know a lot of people my first year."

Of course, being a campus celebrity had its consequences. As the year progressed, Huang says she found herself the center of gossip and the butt of jokes. A false rumor circulated that she was dating one of her teaching fellows, she was parodied in the play "The Real Class of '98," and a profile in Fifteen Minutes, the weekly magazine of The Crimson, portrayed Huang as a flirt and an airhead. She even received hate e-mail from people she didn't know.

In retrospect, Huang says she blames herself for her image that year.

"It was partially my fault I was so well-known freshman year," Huang says. "Looking back at myself, I would find myself kind of annoying for being so over-friendly and trying to meet everybody."

But just as quickly as Huang became known, she vanished from the scene around sophomore year. Today Huang is graduating with few people knowing more about her than what they had heard through the grapevine during her first year.

A Rising Star

Huang's rise to celebrity status began accidentally. At age 12 a vitamin company came to her school looking for children of Chinese descent to appear in a print advertisement; Huang was selected. While doing that job, the coordinator of the project told her she should look into modeling professionally. Huang did, and has been at it ever since.

At age 15, Huang met the Delaware director for the Miss Teen USA program. He encouraged her to enter the contest. Originally Huang declined, but changed her mind the next year. She says she did not know what she was getting herself into when she entered the contest.

"I was really surprised when I won," Huang says, noting that most of the girls she was competing against had much more experience in pageants.

Huang recalls painful memories of the swimsuit competition. Right before she was supposed to compete, peers informed her that contestants always tape their breasts for support. Not mentioning that it is best to use medical tape, one of the other contestants threw her a roll of duct tape, which Huang used. After the competition it took her five hours to remove it from herself.

"Peeling it off was the most miserable experience," Huang recalls.

During high school, Huang learned to work efficiently, balancing her modeling and pageant activities with her work in school.

In addition to her normal academics, Huang enrolled in many college classes at the University of Delaware. It was at the university that she worked on and found a mentor for her award-winning Westinghouse project that explored the possibility of cleaning polluted water with ultrasonic waves.

"I was just lucky for a lot of these things," Huang says.

But when Huang arrived at Harvard, her luck began to change. First, near the end of her fall semester, Huang had to change classes because one of her TFs had been making harassing calls to her late at night. Then, right before finals, one of her best friends, Dominic Armijo '95, committed suicide. After filling out a police report and being sent to talk to psychiatrists, Huang was sent home to cope with the death. She also missed two finals which she had to make up in the middle of midterms during the spring semester.

Huang's bad luck continued. A week before spring finals, Huang found out she had a urinary tract infection. While being treated, which should have been a fairly standard process, Huang experienced complications that led to a kidney infection, excess fluid in her lungs and eye problems. Huang got out of the hospital the night before her first final. Though she hadn't studied, she took her exams because she didn't want to go through taking makeups again.

A Different World

Huang says she thought her low grades meant her career aspiration to become a doctor was over, and she contemplated not coming back to Harvard for her sophomore year.

But Huang did come back, determined to put her first year behind her. She threw herself into her work and retook classes. Living in the Quad, Huang isolated herself from others. She had a steady boyfriend in medical school (to whom she was engaged until recently).

While Huang kept on modeling and competing in pageants (she was named Miss Boston last year), her life was very different.

"I changed a lot," she says of that time. "I became a private person."

But Huang says she also grew emotionally. When she first got to Harvard, Huang put signs up on her wall with goals for herself like "Get straight As."

After Armijo's death, which Huang says was a turning point in her life, she became less goal-focused. She took down all of her signs and put up just one that said, "Be Happy."

Being happy didn't prevent Huang from working hard. She raised her overall GPA to 3.5--without her first-year grades, she would have had a 3.8--and managed to get into University of California at Los Angeles medical school, which she will be attending in the fall.