{"id":17859,"date":"2022-05-04T01:50:26","date_gmt":"2022-05-04T01:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=17859"},"modified":"2022-05-03T20:33:38","modified_gmt":"2022-05-03T20:33:38","slug":"a-new-mendoza-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2022\/05\/04\/a-new-mendoza-line\/","title":{"rendered":"A New \u2018Mendoza Line\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Local student raises achievement bar by landing prestigious 6-figure scholarship<\/i><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

By Eric Valentine<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
Scholarship winner Maria Mendoza has a love of animals she learned from her dad, Isaac. Photo credit: Maria Mendoza<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Maria Mendoza\u2019s life story can read like a movie you\u2019ve seen before, an immigrant family who, thanks to hard work, strong values and American opportunity, create a wonderful life.<\/p>\n

SETTING: Springtime, everywhere. Birds, allergens, high school proms, and graduating seniors\u2019 university hopes wade through the air. Baseball nerds talk about the \u201cMendoza Line\u201d\u2014the sport\u2019s jargon for a sub-.200 batting average originating from light-hitting shortstop Mario Mendoza\u2019s failure to reach the benchmark in more than half of his seasons in the major leagues.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t happened before.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYes, Maria is, to my knowledge, the first student at Sun Valley Community School to be awarded the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship,\u201d Mussman said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Big picture: It\u2019s a big deal. The scholarship is worth $55,000 per year. That\u2019s $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\u2014essentially two per state\u2014get selected. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFrom her performance in the classroom to her environmental stewardship advocacy to her community service work, she has certainly earned it,\u201d Ben Pettit, Head of School at Sun Valley Community School, said. \u201cMaria is an exemplary student\u2014but 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And, she did this during a pandemic in a region that took the brunt of the country\u2019s contagion early and severely. <\/span><\/p>\n

To put the power of this scholarship win into context, look at it this way. Mendoza could:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Pay full, out-of-state tuition costs for Harvard University each year and still have a cool one grand left over every year.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 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\u2019s Blaine County School District housing-affordability stipend.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s likely they factor in a sweet sincerity, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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,\u201d said Mendoza, echoing\u00a0 <\/span>that Hemingway principle to \u201cwrite the truest sentence that you know.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The truth for Mendoza, who holds a 4.13 GPA and acceptance into prestigious Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, is simple and clear. She\u2019s become who she is thanks to her mother Martha and father Isaac, two Atkinsons\u2019 Market employees that immigrated from Peru when Maria was just three years old.<\/span><\/p>\n

From teaching her how to read to spending all night making Valentine\u2019s Day cards for every single student in class, \u201cbecause no child should feel left out,\u201d to marching Maria back to a school event and making her apologize for \u201cstealing a pencil,\u201d Martha Mendoza was the only mentor her daughter would ever really need. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAny time I\u2019m asked to write about a hero, I\u2019m writing about my mom,\u201d Mendoza said, adding a superlative to it all, \u201cShe\u2019s just the best-est mom ever.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mendoza\u2019s father, Isaac, is responsible for his daughter\u2019s 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne 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,\u201d said Mendoza, whose biggest challenge during the pandemic was not stressing out for her parents who, as essential workers, faced multiple people daily.<\/span><\/p>\n

The list of Mendoza\u2019s accomplishments and involvements over her years in the Valley are long:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Tutor for I Have A Dream Foundation<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Intern at Sun Valley Museum of Art<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Bilingual food distributor for The Hunger Coalition<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Founding member of The Community Table, a resource provider in the Valley<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mendoza\u2019s 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\u2014a pediatric neurosurgeon to be precise.<\/span><\/p>\n

As someone who is religious and believes in God, I\u2019m fascinated by the brain and how it gives us the things that make our soul,\u201d Mendoza said, with sincerity, of course. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Local student raises achievement bar by landing prestigious 6-figure scholarship By Eric Valentine Maria Mendoza\u2019s life story can read like a movie you\u2019ve 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\u2019 university hopes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17861,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,74,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17859","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-community","8":"category-education","9":"category-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17862,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17859\/revisions\/17862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}