Local student raises achievement bar by landing prestigious 6-figure scholarship
By Eric Valentine
Maria Mendoza’s life story can read like a movie you’ve seen before, an immigrant family who, thanks to hard work, strong values and American opportunity, create a wonderful life.
SETTING: Springtime, everywhere. Birds, allergens, high school proms, and graduating seniors’ university hopes wade through the air. Baseball nerds talk about the “Mendoza Line”—the sport’s jargon for a sub-.200 batting average originating from light-hitting shortstop Mario Mendoza’s failure to reach the benchmark in more than half of his seasons in the major leagues.
CUT TO: Springtime, here, now. Enter another Mendoza, Sun Valley Community School senior Maria Mendoza, who just raised the bar for academic and extracurricular achievement by landing the prestigious Cooke College Scholarship, something as far as college counselor Royce Mussman is concerned hasn’t happened before.
“Yes, Maria is, to my knowledge, the first student at Sun Valley Community School to be awarded the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship,” Mussman said.
Big picture: It’s a big deal. The scholarship is worth $55,000 per year. That’s $220,000 over the course of four years. Put forth by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the scholarship program this year had more than 5,300 applicants residing in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa applied. Only 100—essentially two per state—get selected.
“From her performance in the classroom to her environmental stewardship advocacy to her community service work, she has certainly earned it,” Ben Pettit, Head of School at Sun Valley Community School, said. “Maria is an exemplary student—but beyond that, she is the sort of community member who leaves the community better than she found it. She has made a real difference here at SVCS and in the larger Wood River Valley.”
And, she did this during a pandemic in a region that took the brunt of the country’s contagion early and severely.
To put the power of this scholarship win into context, look at it this way. Mendoza could:
• Pay full, out-of-state tuition costs for Harvard University each year and still have a cool one grand left over every year.
• Attend UCLA for four years and have enough cash to buy herself a 2022 Subaru Outback (Touring model!) as a graduation present, and still have nearly $10,000 she could loan you for your next car.
• Cover her tuition at University of Idaho, and use the remainder to cover the salary of a first-year teacher in the state of Idaho, including that teacher’s Blaine County School District housing-affordability stipend.
According to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, each submission was evaluated and scholars were selected based on their academic ability, persistence, leadership, and financial need. Students must be current high school seniors residing in the United States. Scholarships are awarded without respect to religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status, geographic region, race, or ethnicity. A big part of the selection process involves answering six questions, each with a word count limit.
It’s likely they factor in a sweet sincerity, too.
“When I was answering the questions, I just kept telling myself to be sincere. It was my mantra: be sincere, be sincere, be sincere. It felt like some of my answers were just not interesting, but I knew they were sincere,” said Mendoza, echoing that Hemingway principle to “write the truest sentence that you know.”
The truth for Mendoza, who holds a 4.13 GPA and acceptance into prestigious Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, is simple and clear. She’s become who she is thanks to her mother Martha and father Isaac, two Atkinsons’ Market employees that immigrated from Peru when Maria was just three years old.
From teaching her how to read to spending all night making Valentine’s Day cards for every single student in class, “because no child should feel left out,” to marching Maria back to a school event and making her apologize for “stealing a pencil,” Martha Mendoza was the only mentor her daughter would ever really need.
“Any time I’m asked to write about a hero, I’m writing about my mom,” Mendoza said, adding a superlative to it all, “She’s just the best-est mom ever.”
Mendoza’s father, Isaac, is responsible for his daughter’s most evident trait: her love of nature, specifically animals. On the Fairfield farm where the Mendoza family now lives, chickens, rabbits, quail, peacocks, dogs, cats and sheep also dwell.
“One positive about the (COVID-19 lockdown) was the amount of time I got to spend with my animals and bond. We really became a family,” said Mendoza, whose biggest challenge during the pandemic was not stressing out for her parents who, as essential workers, faced multiple people daily.
The list of Mendoza’s accomplishments and involvements over her years in the Valley are long:
• Tutor for I Have A Dream Foundation
• Intern at Sun Valley Museum of Art
• Bilingual food distributor for The Hunger Coalition
• Founding member of The Community Table, a resource provider in the Valley
• And, add to that list, aquaponics garden builder after she helped build a fish-and-plant watering system for tilapia that has grown into a de facto Garden Club at her school.
Mendoza’s talents and traits will soon be taken to Pennsylvania for undergraduate work and a major in neuroscience, ultimately resulting in her being a medical doctor—a pediatric neurosurgeon to be precise.
As someone who is religious and believes in God, I’m fascinated by the brain and how it gives us the things that make our soul,” Mendoza said, with sincerity, of course.