MHS Senior Profile: 'I Just Like Helping People'

While many high school seniors are still figuring out what they plan to do with the rest of their lives, Cydney Murray has known since she was 7.

Cydney, who graduates from Moorestown High School Thursday, will attend Rutgers New Brunswick in the fall, following the pre-med track, with a likely major in either biology or chemistry.

Medicine doesn’t run in the family, the 17-year-old said, but it’s something she’s wanted to do since before she was old enough to have a job. Her interest comes from a very pure place.

“I just like helping people, and health is very important,” said Cydney, a Willingboro resident. “And there’s a lot of people who don’t have access to it—at least not without selling a leg or arm.”

She’s still got plenty of time to figure out just what she wants to do with her degree, but right now Cydney is between pediatrics and women’s health.

“For a very long time, medicine focused largely on men, and there’s still a lot really unknown about how women’s bodies function differently than men,” she explained. “And the same thing with children.”

Of the many lessons she learned at Moorestown High School, perhaps the most critical, so far as her future is concerned, was gaining the ability to focus on her own education and worry less about what her peers were doing.

“I learned to really stay focused, because it’s very competitive here,” Cydney said. “Freshman year was a very large adjustment coming from a Friends school (the Friends Academy of Westampton) …. You really just had to stay focused on what you needed to get done and how you were going to go about it without getting distracted by what everybody else is doing.”