Some may soon run the country—and some may soon fade away. Whatever their future, a few extraordinary graduates from U.S. campuses, this year as every year, have already achieved that rare blend of ability and ambition that ignores all obstacles and stretches all talents. Last week TIME correspondents picked a dozen of the top graduates from top schools:
Bandel Bezzerides, 20, a straight-A physics major at the University of California at Berkeley and the No. 1 student in a class of 2,352, says he "didn't work too hard for those grades, really." Son of unlettered. Greek immigrant parents, he grew up in Stockton, where his father ran a wholesale produce house. Winning a state scholarship, he startled Berkeley professors with his "knack for understanding something very complex almost immediately, almost offhandedly.'' Though he says that he ''likes people," he shunned all organized campus activity (including last week's commencement), instead played public-links golf, listened to Bach and Bartok records in his rooming-house quarters. He will study for a Cal doctorate in solid-state physics, but refuses to get excited over his potentially brilliant career. Says he: "I never plan anything more than three days in advance."
Mills College's chic, petite Renata Klara Wlodarczyk (pronounced Vwo-dar-chick), 22, is a Polish-born English major who leaves the West Coast's top women's campus with a Phi Beta Kappa key, a 3.9 average (out of a possible 4.0) and a two-year Marshall Scholarship to Oxford's Lady Margaret Hall College. While her architect father was flying for the R.A.F. in World War II, Renata's mother enlisted in the Polish underground. In 1946 her mother bribed Russian guards and waded with her across a river into Czechoslovakia. Reunited in London, the family got U.S. citizenship in California. Editor of the campus magazine, Renata skis, swims, sails, speaks French. Polish, British-accented English, "and a little Swahili that I picked up on an African safari last year" (courtesy of a classmate's wealthy oilman father). Renata's hopes are for the retreat of Communism ("It goes against human nature") and a future teaching job in a U.S. college. She glows at the prospect of marriage: "Maybe I'll meet a man with a pronounceable name."