In sixth grade, Coppell High School senior Ishan Wakade stepped onto a theater stage for the first time, arms stiff by his sides, reciting his lines into the audience. Looking back, he calls it “cringe.”
But, he did not quit.
“I don’t like being told that I’m bad at something,” Wakade said. “So when I struggled at first, I wanted to just keep going and see if I could improve.”
That instinct, to lean into what he has not yet mastered, shaped nearly every milestone of his high school career. Wakade is class of 2026 salutatorian, and he is headed to Georgia Institute of Technology to study computer science in the fall.
The arc from reluctant sixth grade actor to second in his class was not the plan. It was a byproduct of a mindset Wakade has been sharpening since middle school: stop chasing the destination, focus on the journey.
“I used to be someone who cared more about the destination than the journey,” Wakade said. “For example, in taekwondo, I remember I failed my first black belt test, and I wanted to quit even before getting my black belt. But now, I don’t care too much about the destination. I focus on what I’ve done to get there.”
That shift showed up early in the classroom. As a sophomore, Wakade enrolled in AP Calculus BC, a course populated almost entirely by juniors and seniors. Math teacher Ian VanderSchee expected the usual sophomore struggle: gaps in prerequisite knowledge, constant questions, a student expecting the teacher to fill in missing pieces.
Wakade did the opposite.
“Ishan was aware of the discrepancies that he had moving quickly through the mathematics curriculum, but he took it upon himself to fill in those gaps himself,” VanderSchee said. “Where I would normally anticipate a sophomore would have a lot of questions, Ishan did not have any questions. He would actually just come to me to clarify things as he understood them.”
By the end of the year, Wakade was the one helping seniors review for the AP exam, gathering small groups for guided study sessions while other students coasted to graduation.
Theater, meanwhile, was teaching him something the curriculum could not: time management and personal confidence.
In 10th grade, Wakade joined DECA following his friends’ encouragement. Along with senior Aniketh Chintalaboyana, they qualified for the International Career Development Conference three times, placing in the top 20 their first year and sixth their second.
Their event was a marketing campaign, and both projects they chose centered on technology built to help people, including a pair of glasses that captions speech for deaf users.
“I’d been thinking of it as, I want to create a startup to help people, so I should go into business,” Wakade said. “But in reality, if I want to create a startup or if I want to create anything, I need to learn one of the hard skills. Computer science, I think, is one of the best ones because you can work on projects on your own.”
His competitive streak pushed him the rest of the way. Wakade is quick to clarify what kind of competitor he is: not the kind that needs to win, but the kind that refuses to fall behind. Senior Shrihan Dasari, the class valedictorian and Wakade’s friend since sixth grade, has felt it firsthand.
“He’s always looking towards the next thing,” Dasari said. “Other people might still be celebrating or taking their foot off the gas. He’s always pushing himself further.”
Dasari remembers the two of them trading scores in Algebra II freshman year, each test a quiet benchmark. That dynamic of matching the person next to you, then pushing past, became a pattern.
“He’s inspired me to work harder and challenge myself more by seeing how he always strives to be the best,” Dasari said.
What he wants to leave behind at CHS is not the rank.
“I hope that people remember that I try my best to be helpful to others, especially juniors and sophomores who ask for advice,” Wakade said. “I’m not trying to keep the knowledge to myself.”
Follow @CHSCampusNews on X.
