Poland Native Is Police Academy Valedictorian
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The valedictorian of yesterday’s graduating police academy class, Karolina Wierzchowska, is no stranger to challenges.
Fresh out of high school, Ms. Wierzchowska left her mother and younger brother in Poland and moved to New York City to pursue her dreams.
“My father invited me to live with him in America,” the 5-foot-1-inch Ms. Wierzchowska told her 913 fellow academy graduates at a commencement ceremony at Madison Square Garden. “He asked me what I wanted to do in America, and I told him I wanted to finish school and become a police officer.”
Yesterday, Ms. Wierzchowska, 27, a college graduate, accomplished the second part of the goal she set as a teenager in Warsaw. But it was in the weeks before her graduation, while she was still at the academy, that she realized the breadth of her accomplishments, she said.
“When I was going to the academy, I never thought I was going to be the valedictorian. The process has taught me a lot about myself, that you can really go above and beyond,” Ms. Wierzchowska said as she took a break from a graduation celebration to speak with The New York Sun.
Her dream of becoming a police officer played a major role in her decision to cross the Atlantic, she said. While Ms. Wierzchowska said her native country has become more progressive in recent years, she said she felt it would have been hard as a female to become a police officer in Poland.
“I’ve always wanted a job helping people, and I never wanted to be behind a desk,” she said. “It would have been difficult for me to become a police officer in Poland, so I was really drawn to New York.”
After arriving in the city in 1999, Ms. Wierzchowska moved in with her father, Walter, at his home in the College Point section of Queens, she said.
She quickly joined the police department’s cadet corps, a program that provides police apprenticeships and funding for college. With money from the program, Ms. Wierzchowska graduated from Queens College with just above a 3.7 grade point average, she said.
Before joining the force, Ms. Wierzchowska also spent six years in the National Guard. For more than a year, she was stationed in Iraq, where she worked with military lawyers before returning home in 2005, she said.
Like the rest of her fellow graduates, Ms. Wierzchowska will be deployed to the police department’s Operation Impact, a program that floods high-crime areas with officers on foot patrol. She is assigned to a post in the Midtown North precinct in Manhattan, she said.