The Intellectual Powerhouse
Jonathan Marx
Senior, Richard Montgomery High School
It’s no surprise that Jonathan Marx is captain of Richard Montgomery’s nationally ranked It’s Academic team. A National Merit Scholarship semifinalist with an SAT score of 2380, Jonathan is one smart teen.
He’s a National AP Scholar, earning the maximum score of 5 on seven of the nine Advanced Placement tests he has taken, and 4 on the other two. And he has a 4.71 grade-point average in Richard Montgomery’s highly competitive International Baccalaureate program.
Away from the classroom, the 17-year-old from Chevy Chase applies his intellectual prowess to other endeavors—specifically, as a pitcher on the school’s varsity baseball team.
“Being able to quickly analyze a problem really helps when I’m up on the pitcher’s mound, thinking: In 10 seconds, I’m going to throw a pitch to this 6-foot-4, 220-pound kid who’s the best hitter on the team, what am I going to throw?” the slightly built, 5-foot-10-inch hurler says.
Jonathan has played baseball year-round on a travel team since age 8. And applying his intellect to the game helped him to have the lowest earned run average and to lead the team in innings pitched in 2012.
Conversely, the competitive fire stoked by baseball serves him well on his It’s Academic team, where his desire to win the regional and national “quizbowl” tournaments it participates in fuels hours of study outside of regular practices. And win he does: He has led the school’s team to a national ranking—it was No. 10 in the middle of the 2012-13 quizbowl season—with the “self-confidence, attitude and maturity of a college student,” says his It’s Academic coach, Shelley Reback.
The foundation for each pursuit is his love of learning. As kids, he and his sister, Sarah, a 2010 “Top Teen,” would sit on opposite ends of the couch for hours, lost in their respective books. On a recent weeknight, he was reading Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman after picking it up to research a single quizbowl question.
“It just seemed like fun to read it,” Jonathan says. “I wouldn’t necessarily pick up Death of a Salesman or a collection of 19th-century French short stories on my own, but I’ve done both because of quizbowl.”
Jonathan hopes to attend Yale University, where he already has been accepted, or Brown University, and plans to play baseball wherever he goes.
