Tim Daudelin Follows a Tradition of Family Excellence at NJIT
Tim Daudelin graduated in May with a degree in biology and a ticket to the Ivy League: He has been accepted at Columbia University’s Dental School.
Daudelin, an Albert Dorman Honors College grad who finished with a 3.98 GPA, considered attending medical school but chose dental school instead since "dentistry has more of an artistic element," he says
It’s extremely hard to get into Columbia’s dental school but Daudelin has an impressive resume. At NJIT, he excelled in academics and athletics, as well as research. Along with a major in biology, he had a double minor in chemistry and applied mathematics.
For the past two years, he was captain of the Men’s Cross Country Country and Track and Field teams. And this year, for his performance in indoor track, he was named the Atlantic Sun Conference's Indoor Track Co-Scholar Athlete of the Year. He belonged to the 4x400 meter relay team that holds the indoor record at NJIT. He was also president of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, a nationwide NCAA organization.
In the lab, he worked on an ecology research project with Professor Daniel Bunker, a professor of biology. His research focused on bees, and how the ecosystem effects their emergence in the wild. More recently, he researched colon cance under the direction of Professor Nan Gao.
In high school, Daudelin was named a National Merit Commended Scholar. He belonged to a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team that won first place at state tournaments in both New Jersey and Delaware. His team also made it to the finals of the FTC World Championships.
But what’s most impressive about Daudelin is his family and its tradition of excellence at NJIT. He comes from a family of 10 children, seven of whom are affiliated with NJIT’s Honors College. Three of his brothers have graduated from the college with 4.0 GPAs: the oldest, David,works as a Senior Web Engineer at Krossover, a sports video analytics company. Before that, he was a Senior Software Engineer for Zynga, the maker of social video games. And as a technical architect for AT&T, he created a “smart microphone” that won a Hackathon competition sponsored by the company. AT&T was so impressed with his smart mic that it later commercialized the technology. He’s also a co-founder of Scoutlit, a mobile app company that’s ranks among the top 1 percent of sports apps on Google Play and Apple. He has both a bachelor's and a master's in computer science from NJIT.
Jonathan,the second brother, is a third-year graduate student at Cornell University, where he’s pursuing a doctorate in mechanical engineering. At NJIT, he won the Outstanding Senior Award in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. He also won the President's Medal for Academic Excellence and two Highlander Academic Awards for having the highest GPA (4.0) of any senior on NJIT's Cross Country and Track & Field teams. He was also captain of the track team. When he was 14, Jonathan captained a robotics team that won the first-place Robot Performance and first-place Innovative Robot awards at the FIRST LEGO League World Festival. He became so well known in the field of robotics that a professional writer asked him to co-author a book about the NXT robotics system. He agreed and their book became a bestseller in robotics on Amazom.com. He later co-authored three more books on robotics. During middle school, Jonathan attended MathCounts, a math competition held at NJIT. While there, he learned that students who scored high on the SAT (in math and reading) get scholarships to NJIT. So in eighth grade he took the SAT and scored 1,210. He retook the test during his senior year of high school and scored 1,500, which earned him a full scholarship to the Honors College.
Isaac, the third brother, just finished his second-year at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. He graduated from the Honors College in three years with a 4.0 and a full scholarship to the medical school, where he’s simultaneously pursuing an M.D. and a Ph.D. The joint program, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is only offered to the top students in the nation. It allows him to work on research while also taking medical classes.
And two younger Daudelin siblings are now students in the Honors College: Elizabeth is a math major who finished her sophomore year andDaniel is a biology major who finished his freshman year. A younger brother, John, will be a freshman in the college come fall.
All of the Daudelins were homeschooled through high school, a system they say works wonders on the young mind.
“I think being homeschooled definitely prepared me very well for college,” says Tim Daudelin. “Besides giving me a solid educational foundation, it helped cultivate an enthusiasm for learning and achieving. It also fostered a desire to strive for integrity and excellence in whatever I do. And I find that I enjoy serving and helping others, perhaps in part because of the help I had from my older siblings, and the help I was able to give my younger siblings. It was a very supportive environment.”
And all of the Daudelins are grateful to NJIT and the Honors College for the financial and educational support it has given them.
“Being part of the college has been really good for me,” says Tim. “Most of my upper-level biology classes have been honors sections that have prepared me well for dental school. And all of my siblings, as well as our parents, are grateful to the Honors College for the financial and educational support it has given us. The Honors College has been a blessing to all of us.”