Huang was one of more than 1,000 high school students across the country and 126 in California alone to earn a "Leaders and Achievers" scholarship from Comcast. She'll add this $1,000 award to the half-dozen or so other scholarships she's received.

Comcast awards its scholarships to high school seniors for exemplary community service, leadership skills, positive attitude and academic achievement. Huang demonstrated all these qualities at CHS, where she was captain of the girls basketball team, senior class vice president and president of the California Scholarship Federation, an academic club that centers on community service. She was also an officer in several other campus clubs.

Off campus, Huang volunteered as a candy striper at O'Connor Hospital, where she also helped keep the research labs tidy. Huang, who will major in medicinal biology at Princeton, says her community service helped pique her interest in her chosen field.

"It was good real-world experience," she says.

While her "lab work" mostly involved cleaning up after O'Connor staff, Huang says the experience gave her insight into how a hospital operates.

"We were doing lowly jobs, [but] they need lots of help," she says. "There's a lot of stuff to do. It seems like the jobs are really small, but if no one does them, the whole hospital stops running."

While the number and variety of activities she undertook in high school looked impressive on applications, Huang stresses that she "didn't do things just to get scholarships."

"You can work hard and still do what you like in high school," she says. "I've done everything I wanted to do."

Still, given the cost of a Princeton education, Huang says her scholarships will come in handy.

"Living in the Bay Area, they think everyone here is really affluent, so I didn't get any financial aid," she says. "After I finished my college applications, I started on my scholarships."

Huang says her achievements are representative of those of a lot of the members of the class of 2004.

"This year, Cupertino High School had a really good class," she says. "The kids have really high expectations and goals. They make it seem too easy."