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.”