The high school seniors who rose to the top of the Pathfinder Scholarship Awards announced Wednesday night have not only secured bragging rights for their academic careers to date, they are poised to represent the region for years to come.

LeeAnn Hewitt has plans to compete in the next summer Olympics. Sabrina Ginsberg aspires to become a doctor to NASA astronauts. Celinie Nguyen is on track to crack the grip of world hunger with a nutrient-packed gel for the soil. And Gregory (Terrell) Seabrooks, one of the nation’s leading debaters, has his sights set on the White House.

Not to belittle what the winners have already accomplished.

Classical piano player Jada Campbell performed twice at Carnegie Hall. Mark Heatzig built a drone photography business that serves dozens of Realtor clients. And Shantanu Jakhete had his mosquito research published in a national medical journal.

These students were among 69 soon-to-be graduates from Palm Beach and Martin counties honored for their accomplishments at the 34th annual Pathfinders Scholarship Awards ceremony at the Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach.

Since their inception, the awards, sponsored by The Palm Beach Post, have handed out more than $2.85 million to more than 2,300 students.

Each year, that includes 54 students in public and private schools who earn prizes in 18 categories. First place winners in each category take home $4,000 scholarships. Second-place finalists get $3,000, while third-place finalists earn $2,500. Additional scholarships were also handed out, bringing the awards total Wednesday night to $209,000.

Not surprisingly, they are an articulate bunch, sometimes speaking a language even some adults would find challenging.

“I was intrigued by how a simple first order differential equation (Newton’s Law of Cooling) could accurately model the temperatures of a cooling body or how the simple Beer’s Law and colorimeter could almost perfectly predict concentration of an unknown substance,” wrote Boca High’s Yuria Utsumi, winner in mathematics. She wants to combine her growing math, computing and business skills to make the financial industry more efficient.

Others are to the point.

“I hope to become the strongest woman in the world for powerlifting by age 19,” said LeeAnn Hewitt, who landed the top honor in sports. Hewitt already holds 12 International Powerlifting Federation World Records. Just months ago, she benched 270 pounds and lifted 235 pounds in the clean-and-jerk. Hewitt is no academic slouch, ranking in the top 3 percent of her Wellington High School class.

And others are dreamers.

Reid Champlin, winner in the history and political science category, has mingled with leaders on the world stage including advisers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and aides to the French ambassador to the U.S. He’s worked on a successful campaign to land the first black judge on Palm Beach County’s court. And he watched as his candidate Hillary Clinton fell short of her presidential aspirations. And he’s a soccer ref. His stated goal:

“Walls still stand between us. I want to help tear them down and watch as the partitions give way to a stronger world.”

Erin Krakow will never forget the night she won a Pathfinder Award.

Naturally, it was a big honor to appear at the Kravis Center and be recognized in the annual ceremony for high school excellence. But, 15 years later, she still cringes when remembering her outfit.

“I was wearing an unfortunate blue suit and plain skirt,” Krakow recalled in a phone call from Los Angeles. “It was not my finest fashion moment. I was rocking my frizzy, curly hair. But I owned it.”

When the annual Pathfinders are presented again at the Kravis Center on Wednesday night, it’s not far-fetched to imagine that some winner might think, “Hey, Erin Krakow won this award, too!”

In 2002, Krakow, a Wellington senior attending the Dreyfoos School of the Arts, strode across the stage to accept her first-place Pathfinder for drama. Today, she strides across TV sets as the star of the Hallmark Channel series “When Calls The Heart,” about to enter its fifth season.

On the show, Krakow plays Elizabeth Thatcher, a big-city woman adapting to the rural, turn-of-the-century Canadian west after taking a teaching job in a tiny coal-mining town. She finds romance with a Mountie (because, after all, this is the Hallmark Channel) and goes on a journey to find her place in a world where traditions are slowly evolving.

Growing up in Wellington, Krakow didn’t play sports and get all the achievement trophies that other kids collected. So winning the Pathfinder was important for her.

“Absolutely,” she said. “To have this kind of recognition, it was really meaningful to me. It was validation that I was on the right path.”

Since graduating from Dreyfoos and attending the Julliard School in New York, Krakow, 32, has also co-starred on the Lifetime series “Army Wives” and appeared on the TV series “Castle,” “NCIS: Los Angeles,” and in the Hallmark movie, “Finding Father Christmas.” But she is best known for the family-friendly “When Calls The Heart,” which has a dedicated fan base known as “Hearties,” who are very active on social media.

Krakow said she will be returning to Vancouver in late summer to start filming the fifth season, and wanted to thank all the fans of the show in Palm Beach County, where her parents still live.

“I get a lot of messages through my family,” she said. “It means a lot to have that support.”

And she has some advice for the high school seniors who will be winning Pathfinders on Wednesday night.

“Enjoy the moment. It is a very special and epic event to be surrounded by so many peers and your families. Bask in the glow.”

She also said the Pathfinder recognition, as it did for her, can serve “as a kind of touchstone” to focus winners on their chosen goals.

Krakow said she returns “frequently” to Palm Beach County to see her family. In a previous interview, she said she usually tries to make time for a visit to Dreyfoos, where she appeared in theatrical productions. She praised the school and its drama and music teachers for preparing her “for life and the world, and what I do. I’m so lucky to have gone there.”

And she still has her Pathfinder trophy, by the way.

She knows exactly where it is whenever she wants to remember that night at the Kravis Center, where she may have worn a questionable outfit but was unquestionably on her way to stardom and success.

“My parents have very generously left my room as it was,” she said. “It’s sitting on the desk in my bedroom.”