Malad High senior a 3-sport athlete and student body VP

MALAD CITY — Baylor Bean is a senior at Malad High School. He is a member of the school’s track, cross-country, and basketball teams and is the student body vice president.

Bean, admittedly, struggles to fit all his extracurriculars into his schedule while keeping his primary focus on his grades. The key to doing so, he told EastIdahoNews.com, is prioritizing.

“It’s just accepting that, on weekends, I have to do homework — I’m OK with that so then I can do sports on the weekdays,” he said.

Bean has played basketball since he was in sixth grade, and has long been a track athlete — while joking that he was “dragged into” cross-country as a sophomore but has stuck with it.

Sophomore years is also when he joined the student council — serving first as class secretary, then as class president before being elected student body president this year. The greatest aspect of student council, he said, is being able to work with a group of people he enjoys and respects — plus, he added, he gets to be involved in many of the of groups and club across campus.

With graduation approaching, Bean has two primary options he is considering.

Having already been offered an academic scholarship to attend Utah State University, he is considering going straight to college, where he plans to study biology.

He is also weighing the option of serving an LDS mission before he goes to college.

Asked where he would like to serve his mission, Bean said he would love to go anywhere outside the United States.

“I just want to go somewhere with a different culture, to have a different experience,” he said.

Bean knows he wants to go into the medical field — though he is unsure about what specific wing of the medical world is suited for him. So, he wants to break into the world by earning a bachelors degree in biology before going on to graduate school.

Bean said people may be surprised to learn of his experience working on his family’s ranch. He currently lives on a “smaller” 400-acre ranch in the Malad Valley, but was born, and spent the first 13 years of his life, working his family’s cattle ranch back in Salmon.

Having spent his entire life in Idaho, Bean said he plans to return home at some point. He expects to explore “the big world” for “10, 15, maybe 20 years” before finding his way back home.