You’re walking around Rapid City with your family and you start feeling lightheaded and dizzy. You know what is happening but you have no control over it. The pain in your chest starts skyrocketing until suddenly you pass out.

This describes an experience Gabriel Martinez has had, and it is caused by a heart arrhythmia (improper beating of the heart). During marching band and other physically strenuous tasks, Martinez said he would often begin to feel light headed and knew that the most important thing was to stop playing and breathe. He later had surgery to fix this and it caused him to miss a lot of school, resulting in him getting two B’s, which “lowered my class rank.” During his surgery, Martinez’s heart was opened and surgeons cauterized his nerves, which means that the shortcuts the electric impulses would take to make his heart beat irregularly were blocked off.

When Martinez was younger, he wanted to be an astronomer. “Space was my favorite subject and I always thought that the Hubble telescope was really cool,” Martinez said. After high school, he will attend Georgia Tech University to study aerospace engineering. One of his goals is to find success with a startup and sell it to Google. Martinez credits Mr. Hansen, his fourth-grade teacher, for “teaching me how fun it can be to love math and science.”

The Black Hills of South Dakota is Martinez’s favorite place to vacation and he enjoys cliff jumping at Jenny Gulch. His favorite high school memory is “playing pep band with the squad.” Competing in and winning his first novice congressional debate tournament is an event that Martinez is proud of.

Martinez’s parents were married after his father graduated from the Technological Institute of Mona Ray in 1990. Martinez has one half-brother from his mom’s first marriage, as well as an older brother and a sister.