Karp ’10 named valedictorian

Karp, a mechanical and aerospace engineering major who is pursuing certificates in applied and computational mathematics and applications of computing, is ranked first in his class with a 4.0 GPA and 29 A’s and A-pluses after seven terms. He plans to study computational fluid dynamics after graduation.

“Last week, [Associate Dean of the College Claire] Fowler let me know that Dean Malkiel was going to nominate me, and I was pretty floored,” Karp said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “I just sat in her office being, like, ‘Wow, that’s awesome,’ for a while.”

In February, Karp was awarded a Churchill Scholarship, which he will use for a year of engineering graduate study at Cambridge University, and in March he received a Hertz Foundation fellowship, a $250,000 “no-strings-attached” award that he will use for five years of doctoral study at Stanford. Karp is also a former staff writer for The Daily Princetonian.

“It’s certainly in some ways a validation of the long nights,” Karp said.

Karp was previously awarded the Class of 1939 Academic Scholar award last September for achieving the highest academic standing in his class after three years of study, and he has also twice won the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence. He was inducted into the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa in 2009 and the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi in 2008.

For his senior thesis, Karp researched using computer simulations to optimize air flow around an airfoil and he plans to expand on his research to study design optimization of scramjet-powered planes and rockets in the future.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Emily Carter said that Karp was one of the best undergraduate students she had taught in her career, which has spanned more than two decades.

“I have taught thousands of undergraduates here at Princeton and before that at UCLA, and David is among the top very few I have had the pleasure of teaching,” she said.

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Karp was also treasurer of Charter Club in 2009 and is the founder of Black Squirrels, an independent intramural sports team.

A history major who has excelled at Latin during her time at the University, Colson is the highest-ranking senior in her department and is ranked 14th in her class overall with 22 A’s and A-pluses after seven terms. Upon learning about her selection as salutatorian, “I was totally shocked,” Colson said.

Colson’s family was thrilled to learn that she had received the honor, she said. “They were really excited, though some of them didn’t even know who the salutatorian was,” she noted, explaining that the confusion may have arisen because the title often refers to the student with the second-highest GPA in the class.

Colson attributed her success at the University to not putting excessive academic pressure on herself. “The idea of finding a balance — I can’t even pretend that I’ve spent every moment in a library,” she said. “I’ve had a ton of fun here; I have a great group of friends; I’m in an eating club. I guess these are all things that I feel like make me like the place as much as I do ... If I went to a place that put a 100 percent emphasis on academics, I don’t think I would have thrived there.” Colson is a member of Ivy Club.

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She was awarded the Quin Morton ’36 Writing Seminar Essay Prize and is a fellow at the Writing Center. For her senior thesis, Colson researched former secretary of state Edward Stettinius’s role in establishing the United Nations.

Classics professor Denis Feeney, who taught Colson in a course on Virgil’s “Aeneid,” described her as a valuable member of the class.

“I came to rely on her pointed and incisive interventions,” he said in a statement that Malkiel read at the faculty meeting. “She displayed a remarkable critical maturity; together with her highly impressive language skills, this marked her out as one of the very best Latin students it has been my pleasure to teach in 10 years at Princeton.”

Colson is also a Community House volunteer at the Princeton Nursery School and tutors English as a second language. After graduation she will work at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as a Princeton Project 55 fellow.

Karp and Colson will speak at Commencement on June 1.