A Westinghouse finalist, one of USA Today's Top 20 High School Seniors and a Presidential Scholar, Catherine K. "Cat" Huang '98 sounds like a remarkable, albeit stereotypical, Harvard academic.

But despite a resume that boasts a perfect SAT score, Huang was known among many of her classmates not as a scholar but as a beauty queen.

The winner of the Miss Delaware Teen USA title in 1993, Huang was one of several in her class who had won beauty pageants, modeled, or performed in commercials. But what made Huang stand out more than anyone was that when she hit the campus, everyone knew it.

Huang says that as a first-year, she went out five to six times a week, frequented final clubs and dated several guys.

"I was really excited to go to Harvard and friends have always been a very important part of my life." Huang says. "Therefore, I tried to get to know a lot of people my first year."

Of course, being a campus celebrity had its consequences. As the year progressed, Huang says she found herself the center of gossip and the butt of jokes. A false rumor circulated that she was dating one of her teaching fellows, she was parodied in the play "The Real Class of '98," and a profile in Fifteen Minutes, the weekly magazine of The Crimson, portrayed Huang as a flirt and an airhead. She even received hate e-mail from people she didn't know.

In retrospect, Huang says she blames herself for her image that year.

"It was partially my fault I was so well-known freshman year," Huang says. "Looking back at myself, I would find myself kind of annoying for being so over-friendly and trying to meet everybody."

But just as quickly as Huang became known, she vanished from the scene around sophomore year. Today Huang is graduating with few people knowing more about her than what they had heard through the grapevine during her first year.

A Rising Star

Huang's rise to celebrity status began accidentally. At age 12 a vitamin company came to her school looking for children of Chinese descent to appear in a print advertisement; Huang was selected. While doing that job, the coordinator of the project told her she should look into modeling professionally. Huang did, and has been at it ever since.

At age 15, Huang met the Delaware director for the Miss Teen USA program. He encouraged her to enter the contest. Originally Huang declined, but changed her mind the next year. She says she did not know what she was getting herself into when she entered the contest.

"I was really surprised when I won," Huang says, noting that most of the girls she was competing against had much more experience in pageants.

Huang recalls painful memories of the swimsuit competition. Right before she was supposed to compete, peers informed her that contestants always tape their breasts for support. Not mentioning that it is best to use medical tape, one of the other contestants threw her a roll of duct tape, which Huang used. After the competition it took her five hours to remove it from herself.

"Peeling it off was the most miserable experience," Huang recalls.