FOUNTAIN VALLEY HIGH SCHOOL:

Claudia Cheffs

Claudia Cheffs isn’t sure if she wants to be a lawyer — but she knows how to play the part.

As a sophomore, Claudia was given the role of a prosecuting attorney in a short play at Fountain Valley High. To do research, she attended a mock trial competition, in which teams of students enact a court case under the eye of a judge.

“Once I did that, I thought, ‘This is really interesting,’” said Claudia, 17. “I ended up playing the role better.”

Not only that, but Claudia ended up joining her school’s mock trial team her junior and senior years. It was another item on the resume for the eclectic teen, who also competed with the swim team, wrote for the school newspaper and got a job last August taking photographs for a cruise company in Newport Beach.

Freedom didn’t always run in Claudia’s family, as her parents fled communist Poland in the early 1980s and gradually made their way from Western Europe to the United States. World affairs are of particular interest to Claudia, who plans to attend UC Irvine this fall as a political science major.

“If my parents hadn’t left there and I’d grown up there, it would have been so different,” she said.

— Michael Miller