Pueblo County High School senior Li Hong Sweet-Seip among Boettcher scholarship winners

Pueblo County High School senior Li Hong Sweet-Seip is humble but competitive, principal Brian Dilka said. He has also overcome difficulties in his life and gone on to become one of 50 students statewide to receive the Boettcher award, a merit-based scholarship covering four years of tuition and fees at Colorado institutions.

His application was picked from “nearly 1,700 highly qualified applicants,” according to the Boettcher Foundation.

“While Sweet-Seip is humble, he’s ultra competitive,” Dilka said. “He doesn’t enter things just for fun. Even though it’s fun for him, he wants to win.”

Sweet-Seip, an avid participant in extracurricular competitions, agreed with his principal’s assessment.

“That’s true, but any competition you enter, you want to win, right?” he said.

Sweet-Seip helped his Pueblo County High School classmates qualify among the top 10 nationally in StellarXplorers, a space design competition. He also has participated in Knowledge Bowl, choir, track and field, and the Technology Student Association (TSA).

Stellar Xplorers: Pueblo County High School team among ten finalists in national space design competition

With a passion for aerospace technology, Sweet-Seip plans on enrolling in the five-year master’s program at Colorado School of Mines to study mechanical engineering.

“I always thought it would be cool to be involved in some way with rockets, especially with the new space race with SpaceX, NASA doing the Artemis program,” he said. “I obviously wasn’t alive during the Apollo missions, but sort of the excitement, I’m sure it’s somewhat similar. Being involved in that has always been exciting to me.”

Sweet-Seip also has an interest in developing prosthetics. Born with Poland syndrome, a condition that has left him unable to use his right hand, he has learned to do everyday tasks without a prosthetic.

For his Engineering, Design and Development class senior project, he is working on designing an affordable and functional prosthetic hand for people with disabilities.

“Personally, that’s important to me,” he said. “I want to finish the project sometime in college because right now I am restricted by the equipment needed to manufacture such small parts … The goal for that would be that anyone who wanted to make one would be able to make one.

“I learned to live without one, but for someone who was in an accident, they are used to using both hands. Having to transition to not having an extra hand could be problematic.”

As a Boettcher scholar, Sweet-Seip had the opportunity to honor one of his teachers who played a significant role in shaping his success with a 2022 Teacher Recognition Award. He chose Vicki Bowker, a digital electronics and engineering teacher at Pueblo County High.

Pueblo Chieftain reporter James Bartolo can be reached by email at JBartolo@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Pueblo County High School student a Boettcher scholarship winner