JORGE ALVAREZ HAS TWO PASSIONS: COOKING AND MUSIC.

FROM BOTH.

Woodrow Wilson High School senior Alvarez says, “It always comes down to money.” But, one way or another, he’s determined to pursue his dreams when he graduates in May.

Alvarez received his love of cooking from his dad, Jose, who was the chef at Celebrity Café & Bakery before he died of cancer in 2009.

Cooking is a family business, and Alvarez is a firm believer in tradition and family legacy. Growing up, his family seemed to enjoy cooking together so much, it fostered a dream in Alvarez to someday become a chef like his father and grandfather.

“I want to make my dad proud,” he explains.

But money is tight for Alvarez’s mom, so she won’t be able to send Alvarez to culinary school. He would never ask her to, anyway.

His other passion, music, began while he was watching a jazz band on TV. Something about the sax player gripped him, and he was hooked. From that moment he knew he wanted to learn to play.

Alvarez began playing saxophone in sixth-grade. Eventually he ended up in the band at Woodrow, which continued to encourage his love of music. It also became a training ground to cultivate his natural leadership skills.

Band Director Chris Evetts made him one of two drum majors and even awarded him a “best leadership” plaque at last year’s band banquet.

“I chose Jorge for that, easily,” Evetts says. “It’s in his nature to be very adult-like; it’s who he is. He impressed me right away because he was the only kid who would come up and ask me, ‘What needs to be done?’ ”

Band rehearsals and performances take a lot of preparation, Evetts says. Alvarez took the initiative to help load and unload equipment. He even recruited other students to assist, which soon boosted him into the position of loading captain.

When the time came for Evetts to find drum majors, he encouraged Alvarez to audition.

“It was exactly as I expected: He was very good at leading the other kids,” Evetts says.

Alvarez also worked hard at fundraising by selling chocolate bars in order to pay for private lessons, camps, trips and other expenses. He sold 20 boxes — far more than any other student sold.

A band scholarship would be a gamechanger for Alvarez. Culinary schools don’t have bands, but Alvarez also is considering a career in music education if he can earn a scholarship.

Recently, Alvarez landed a job at Chipotle in order to save for a car. He hopes it will help him dip his toe into the food industry. Chipotle’s business model of promoting from within and helping qualified employees with their education piqued Alvarez’s interest.

“It’s a step toward the future,” he says.

He also happens to enjoy working there, he says, and has already received recognition for his hard work and determination from higher-ups at the location.

“I’ve got other seniors who don’t even seem to be aware that they should have been looking at colleges. Jorge has already started earning his own money for college,” Evetts says.

“That just speaks to the kind of determination he’s got, that he’s not going to let himself lose. He’s going to graduate, and he’s going to be ready.”

Choi was almost as fresh when he moved to East Dallas less than a year later.

He started attending J.L. Long Middle School, where he took ESL classes to help him get a grip on the language, but he was struggling.

“I knew a little about how to talk to people, but I didn’t know how to read or write in English,” he says.

He finished the ESL course in a year, and although he felt he still needed it, his teacher encouraged him to attend regular classes at Woodrow Wilson High School in order to learn more.

“That has been hard,” he admits.

At first, he felt isolated from his peers because of language barriers, and some students even picked on him. Although there were other Asian-American students, none of them spoke Korean.

“I didn’t really have anyone to talk with about my life, so that was stressful,” he says.

He couldn’t visit his friends or family in South Korea because of the terms of his visa, but by 10th-grade, he had the confidence he needed to make friends who helped him understand things about American culture, such as sarcasm, slang and jokes.

He continued to go to tutoring after class, but he’s still slow at reading and writing in English, which is a significant disadvantage to him in his International Baccalaureate (IB) classes.

IB, one of the four academies offered at Woodrow, is known for being workload intensive, but that’s the academy his middle school friends joined, so Choi followed suit.

He did well in the freshman and sophomore pre-IB and AP classes, and he even managed to excel in his junior year of IB classes.

“Junior year I thought, ‘I can do this,’ ” he recalls. “When I got to my senior year, the [classroom] strategy changed.”

He had to do more reading in his history class than he could keep up with, and some of the classroom exercises in English were beyond his capability — particularly the timed analysis of poetry.

He ended up dropping out of IB English and history, but he stayed in IB biology because he enjoys it. Despite the challenges, Choi will graduate in May with a GPA he can be proud of.

Susan Odeski, a college and career advisor at Woodrow, considers Choi “a student of outstanding character and high goals.”

He’s already been accepted to several universities, including UT Dallas. He wants to study biology, or something related to science, so he can eventually go to medical school and become a doctor, he says.