After returning to RE as a chemistry teacher for the 2025-2026 school year, Mr. Medina has made an impression among the student body, and especially among sophomores.
“My experience with Mr. Medina has been excellent. Since he’s just out of college, he’s relatable with the students. He is always welcoming me to ask any questions I have, and I feel like I can ask him anything,” Kemi Roberts ’28 said.
Students see him as both an attentive teacher and the ultimate academic role model—an example of someone who climbed to the very top of RE and Princeton through sheer brilliance.
For Medina, however, the story was more complicated, and much more about persistence. Growing up in South Miami, Medina attended both RE Middle and Upper School. School didn’t necessarily come effortlessly to him, which is a common misconception for a valedictorian of an Ivy League school, but he worked diligently around the cloc
“I ended up doing very well in my classes, but I worked very, very hard for what I got. I definitely would not say it was an easy time. I spent many, many long hours studying and doing homework when I was in high school,” he said.
Former RE Chemistry teacher Mr. Jorge Camacho described Medina as one of the brightest, most sincere, humble, and down-to-earth students he has ever had in his 25 plus years of teaching.
“Every year you guys get the lecture about the different groups of people,” Camacho said, referring to Paul Ransom’s letter. “Mr. Medina is the embodiment of that 3rd group of people. He truly was. He was the type of person and student that looked to how he could give back more than he took,” Mr. Camacho said.
Following his high school career, Medina attended Princeton and majored in Chemistry, specifically focusing on polymer chemistry. As a senior, he took an upper-level organic chemistry class, which housed the infamous failure of an exam. Despite the outcome, Medina felt confident going into the test, which was a take-home exam consisting of five questions.
“This was something I’d been doing at this point for like 7 years. This is my area of specialization. This is what I wrote my senior thesis on, like, this is what I did for a living, essentially for years.”
Medina spent 48 hours working on the exam.
48 hours.
And he scored a raw 70, with a class average of 85.
“I felt like, wow, I’m doing badly and everyone else is doing better. It was the first time that I really felt out of place, which really sucks when you’re a senior and this is what you’re planning on doing for a living. That was kind of a wakeup call.”
It was an alienating feeling for Medina, who was accustomed to achieving perfection—even if it took a lot of effort to get there.
“It was a humbling experience, but everyone who does science will be humbled at some point in their experience. It happens to everyone. If you do it long enough, if you keep going, eventually, you will be
The experience left him with a different sense of what advice he would give to high school students, or students of any age: to succeed, y
“If you were to look in a dictionary for the word perfectionism, there’d be a little photo of me next to it. That’s perfectionism, so I get it,” he said. “I’ve been that way since I was 5 years old. Like, absolutely hardcore perfectionism, and it was really hard for me for a long time because I would accept nothing less than perfection. No one else was pushing me to do this. It was very much me.”
But eventually, he realized even his absolute best was not going to be perfect. It just wasn’t. And as defeating as it was, he had to accept that.
“Definitely something that I came to appreciate only my senior year of college was simply knowing how to bounce back and to realize it’s okay to stumble. You’re allowed to stumble. You should stumble. If you don’t learn to stumble when you’re in high school and when you’re in college, life gets harder because you never learn to stumble and to get back up,” he said.
After he finishes his year of teaching at RE, Medina will go on to attend a Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin, where he hopes the lesson he learned in college—how to pick himself up and have grit—will come in handy.
And who knows, maybe one day he will return to RE once again as Dr. Medina.
