• Crafting a career

Eli Klenda gets called out by his Marion High School classmates when he says he’s never really designed anything even though his college major at Kansas State University will be biomedical engineering.

“He’s lying to you,” said one of four top Marion graduates interviewed by the Record. “He really is crafty in the woodshop.”

Though woodworking may not be the medically useful athletic prosthetics he hopes to develop, Eli has spent much of his high school career designing an impressive array of furniture and household items.

Woodshop is where he first put his career two-and-two together: “I’ve always kind of wanted to go into health care, and I love designing things, and so combining the two, I just kind of stumbled into biomedical engineering.”

The smell of fresh-cut lumber is powerful when Eli swings through the door of Marion’s spacious woodshop to show a sample of his work: a charcuterie board with an American flag motif and maple inlay stars. The clean, beautiful lines of his work suggest creative confidence.

Eli is co-valedictorian, with a perfect four-year, 4.0 GPA, and he’ll admit that he finds calculus a lot easier than composition.

But like many graduates across the county, he says the toughest challenge he’s faced is to “balance everything I do in high school — clubs, leadership, sports — and having to sacrifice one thing to keep something else up.”

The calm of rural life away from fast-pace pressure would be his dream place to live, he said. But having recently written a school paper on rural brain drain — young people moving away for lack of economic opportunity — he concluded: “I don’t think I’d be able to work here in biomedical engineering.”