Winning Portfolio: Sierra Allen

Sierra Allen is the Sterling Scholar Northeast Region runner-up in the General category. Read a Q&A about how she prepared this portfolio HERE. 

Q&A with a General Category Runner-Up Winner

Sierra Allen is the Sterling Scholar Northeast region runner-up in the General category. She will graduate this May from Grantsville High School as the salutatorian with a 3.99 GPA and got a 32 on the ACT. After high school, she plans on serving an LDS Church mission before attending Utah State University. Having worked on her school yearbook all four years, and this year as senior editor, she has an interesting perspective on creating a Sterling Scholar portfolio. P.S. Sierra is also my daughter. :-)

Why did you want to do Sterling Scholar?

I like being the best at everything, so I wasn’t going to let someone else be what I wanted to be. It’s prestigious, a lot of good kids all over the state compete for it. You get to prove yourself against everyone else.

When did you start thinking Sterling Scholar?

At least my freshman year. I saw it in the Deseret News and I just wanted to do that. I knew I could do it. Maybe not really overconfident, but I knew I wanted it so I worked hard.

What did you do in those years leading up to your senior year?

Be involved. If an opportunity came up, I said yes. I went the extra mile in things.

How did you choose your category?

I thought General was the best, so I always wanted the best.

What advice would you give a younger student?

You need to be involved in more than school. Those are open for everyone. I did Range Camp, Rotary, and Fiji service trip. Those aren’t available to everyone. You have to find them and do it.

Find what you’re passionate in. There’s always Google and the Internet.

How did you prepare your portfolio?

I wrote an outline, a right and left hand side, so I knew exactly what was going to be on each page. I divided it into academics, leadership and citizenship. I filled in each page from the outline.

I started on the book, dragging pictures in and writing copy. I drew the layouts first in a notebook, then transferred it over.

I looked at a couple of other portfolios, one of which was region runner-up. I also looked through magazines and college mailings, looking at graphic elements.

Do you have design recommendations?

Don’t make it look like a scrapbook, cute and full of little things that, in my opinion, don’t make portfolios look as professional. It’s hard to read when you have a bunch of cute little boxes all over the page. It needs to be more business-like; this shows a certain maturity.

In Yearbook, we always have a headline, so you know what the page is about. You have a dominant photo, a body copy (main paragraph), smaller photos and captions. You want to keep things simple and easy to understand and navigate instead of, here’s a body copy that continues here and here, jumping around, and it’s not clear.

Keep things simple and clean. Even if content is good, if there’s something about style that is distracting and turns you off, you’ll have a weird feeling about reading it. It’s better to be understated than off-the-wall.

How about copy?

Concentrate on the different experiences you did that made you feel. Introduce what you did, what time period you did it in. What exactly it was. Explain it well enough that someone that doesn’t know what you did will understand it.

Focus on feelings and lessons, more engaging and personable than just listing achievements. It shows going in depth, takes more thinking. It’s easy to list off accomplishments. It takes more effort to put your feelings and thoughts, but it’ll pay off.

I had a really hard time writing copy in Publisher because I was worried about layout, so I started writing paragraphs in Word and copied it onto Publisher. That helped a ton.

Fonts are a big deal. You want clean, simple fonts. Don’t go overboard with cute calligraphy things. You want to attract them through content instead of a distracting design and empty content.

Do you have suggestions for the interview?

Beforehand, picture yourself the happiest you’ve been, and do it before you go. I always feel my best when I’m serving. I was making friendship bracelets for kids in Africa. It put me in the frame of mind that I was happiest, because people always think they have to do something special that day. So they get keyed up. Just make it like your normal day.

When you go into interviews, be comfortable. Everyone has different styles. Just be yourself. Don’t be concerned about how you think you should sound like. If they can’t accept that, it’s not your problem anymore.

It’ll be fun if you make it fun. Think of it as a conversation, of all the cool things you’ve done. Not to brag about them, but to show what you’ve done. The judges are there and interested, want to know about what you’re interested. Get excited about what you love.

Lots of people get intimidated by the judges, but if you want to be super-good, act super-good. I’m going into a meeting, I’m not begging for their help. It’s a business partnership. You’re trying to tell them you’re top, don’t act or think like you’re inferior to them.

I had practiced questions on the way up with a friend, but the judges didn’t ask any of them. They asked about things in my portfolio. There’s not really a good way to prepare. Feel comfortable beforehand, and passionate about things in your portfolio. No matter what they ask, you’ll be ready with your answer.

Any other advice?

It’s hard to give a formula for Sterling Scholar. It’s almost like an attitude. What helped me, is, I’m ambitious, driven and confident. Those traits carry into your school work. Then into your interview. If you say, “Look, I’m good.” You can have a high test score, but if you’re not confident, it won’t help.

It’s really about doing and going the extra mile. If you think, maybe I should do that...the difference between winners and those who don’t, the winners did what you wanted to but didn’t do. You might say, “I don’t have time,” or, “I had a late night last night.” Going to one conference can lead to more doors opening up. One thing I was involved in kept branching off.

Check out Sierra's winning portfolio HERE.

Sterling Scholar Profile: A World View

by Jewel Allen

[This was a profile I wrote for the Transcript Bulletin, published on Nov. 22, 2011. Amanda Howa was named Stansbury High School's Skilled & Technical Science Education Studies Scholar and, after the piece ran, placed in the region level.]

Well-traveled SHS senior interns as nurse in mom's German hometown

Since fifth grade, Amanda Howa has spent her summer vacations in her mom’s German hometown. This past summer was different, however. For three weeks in July, the Stansbury High School senior worked as a nursing intern at the University Medical Clinic in Mannheim, Germany.

Fluent in German and English, Howa had no problem communicating. Changing dressings was a little trickier, though. On her second day, she passed out.

“I was sent to clean the wound of a patient who had tubes coming out of his abdomen,” she said. “I cleaned the area and applied a fresh bandage. After I left the room, I remember waking up in the nurses’ lounge. I had gotten so nervous and scared, I had passed out.”

When her supervisor asked her if she wanted to stay on and finish the internship, she said she would. “When that patient was ready to have the tubes removed, I was there to do it, without passing out.”

Howa (pronounced Ha-wah) highlighted this experience as an example of her perseverance on her Sterling Scholar application. That seemed to impress the judges since she was named SHS’s Skilled & Technical Science Education Sterling Scholar on October 28.

As far as Howa knows, she’s the only SHS student with foreign experience related to her category. It came about when a family friend’s daughter landed a nursing internship at the hospital and arranged for Howa to do one there, too.

The urology department internship turned out different than what Howa expected.  “They gave me a paper saying, ‘You’re just going to watch everything and clean tables.’ After the first day, I told my mom, ‘I took out I.V.s, and took out catheters from men and women.’ Most of the patients were men who had prostate cancer.”

“I expected the internship to be on the urinary tract,” she said, “instead, I prepped (patients) for surgery, basically anything in the abdominal area. A few had abnormal masses, tumors. After surgery, they came back to us.”

She really wanted to watch surgeries, but since she wouldn’t turn 18 yet until October, she couldn’t. “I was able to go down to the surgery rooms, but the only time I was able to go down there was to collect medicine.”

Still, she made the most of her experience. “I was always asking for more things to do.”

At the end of the year, she will earn her pharmacy technician license, after which she should be hearing back from college pre-med programs she’s applied for. Ultimately, Howa dreams of being a surgeon. Her mom Ute (pronounced Oo-the) said she’s wanted to be a surgeon since she was in first grade probably because a year before that, her Oma (grandmother) Cacilia passed away, and they had gone to the hospital a lot.

Last year, Howa narrowed down her interest to cardiovascular medicine.“We dissected a cow heart during Medical Anatomy & Physiology,” she said. “We had learned about the ventricles and the atrium. Opening (the heart) up and seeing it, it was interesting to see the different parts.”

Howa spoke German exclusively at the hospital. “Everything was German, the setting, the community.” Something she’s been familiar with all her life through her mom.

Her parents met in 1988 when Howa’s dad, Steven, was stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army. Two years later, they married and moved to Utah. When Howa was three, they packed their bags once again for Germany. Midway through Howa’s fourth grade, their family transferred to Alabama. Their family once again pulled up stakes in February of 2008, finally settling in Stansbury Park.

Ute said Howa doesn’t have a noticeable accent either when she speaks German or English. She talked to her and Howa’s younger sister Jennifer in German while they were growing up while Steven spoke to them in English.

For someone so young, Howa has traveled to more places than most people dream of going to in their lifetime. This is because every summer, they not only go to Germany to visit her Opa (grandfather) Josef and aunt Beate, but they travel to at least one other European country. This past summer, for instance, her family vacationed for a week in England before Howa started her internship.

“The cars were cute,” she said, referring to the small cars the British are famous for, and how people were driving on the left side of the road. At Buckingham Palace, she was “yelled at for using a flash” and enjoyed watching the changing of the Guards. They stopped at St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Shakespearean Globe Theater. A Harry Potter fan, she was thrilled to be able to see landmarks from the movie.

They spent the second to the last day (“one of two days when the sun came out”) at Stonehenge. To get there, they took a one-and-a half-hour train ride to Salisbury (“At the Salisbury Cathedral, nothing in the church said ‘Harry Potter’.”), then 25 more minutes to Stonehenge, which was “windy. The entire area was flat.”

“It’s nice to be able to say, ‘I’ve been there,’” she said. “I’ve seen these places in history books.”

While they lived in Germany, their family traveled to Luxemburg and the Netherlands. In Switzerland, they drove through the Alps. They visited a castle in Austria and the city where Mozart was born. In Berlin, they went to Holocaust museums and saw the spot in the ground where the Berlin wall used to stand.

She’s walked the 400 steps up the Sacre Couer cathedral in Paris. She’s seen the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Eiffel tower, too. “We went up to the (tower’s) top during the day. At night, it was really pretty because it was all lit up.”

She’s gotten off the subway in Rome and was surprised that, “there’s this little street, then the Coliseum’s right there. I expected (the Coliseum) to be different. I pictured it to be flat like in the movies, but it was all sunken in.” In Italy, across from the Coliseum, she walked through the Forum, which was the hub of Ancient Rome. Naples, Howa declared, “has the best pizza in the world.”

The highlight of her Prague, Czech Republic trip was eating at restaurant in a castle. The dish, “a stuffing-red-pasta mixture,” was Bavarian. “The meat was rich,” she said. “It fills you up. It’s like a big lump.” She laughed. “It sounds really gross, but it’s not like that, it was good.”

How does this middle-class American family afford the $1500 airfare it costs them per person, per trip? Ute, who substitute-teaches for Tooele County School District and Excelsior Academy said, “Basically, the money I make goes toward trips to Germany. In other countries, we stay at Holiday Inn Express. We don’t eat at expensive places. I’d rather travel instead of getting a big-screen TV.”

Surprisingly, Howa’s shortlist of colleges she hopes to get into doesn’t include one in a foreign country, not even Germany.

“I like the idea of Alabama,” she said of the place she fondly remembers as having especially-yummy, especially-greasy funnel cakes. “It’s in the 70s there right now.”