Sahand Setareh, a junior at Fossil, is an often misrepresented person in the school. Due to his skin color and nationality being different, he receives discrimination from multiple people who are quick to judge him based on these factors.

Born and raised in Superior, Colorado, Sahand has always been a very athletic person and loves to be active and in shape. He has played football and basketball for 4 years, but does not currently play for a team. Setareh does plan on playing for Fossil Ridge’s football team for his senior year in high school.

Sahand has a backstory that no one sees on the surface when looking at him, and has plenty of stories in him. When he was a child, his father had cancer, and him and his family learned to compensate with this fact together. His father had survived the cancer, and the outcome was an even stronger bond between his family. His family is extremely important to him and he abides by their rules and wants to please them as much as he can.

The whole Setareh family is Persian at heart, and their culture is greatly centered around the Persian lifestyle. Him and his whole family speak in Farsi, the official Persian language, as their first language, though Sahand is very fluent in English. He has an ultimate goal to fluently speak 7 languages by the beginning of his adulthood and is currently learning more and more languages every school year.

Sahand is passionate about many things and loves to learn, but Astronomy is the one thing he is looking to pursue as a future for his life. He finds space and the mystery within it very interesting and his long term goal is to eventually become an astronaut to further his understanding of what space is really all about.

Expression is one thing that is important to Sahand. He enjoys speaking his mind and is immensely outgoing. His perspective on life is very loose; Sahand is very open minded to new things and new perspectives. He loves being social and getting to know people, since he says that everyone has an interesting side to them that is waiting to be discovered by someone who is interested. He believes that what he does for others is valued more than what he does for himself and wants to live big because every single day is a blessing to him.

Optimism is a strong characteristic in Sahand and he loves to be charismatic as much as he can in hopes of inspiring others. He sets an example for others by doing what others won’t do and by doing the right things whenever the opportunity pops up. In a world that accepts number 2, Sahand strives to be number one since he believes that if you are not first, you’re last.