Big Walnut’s Alley going places

Dar­ian Alley

Story and photo by

LIZ ROBERTSON

Big Walnut’s Dar­ian Alley hopes to some­day live in France.

“I’m going places; I’m leav­ing here,” she said.

With plans to dou­ble major in inter­na­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tions and polit­i­cal sci­ence and minor in French, her goal is to some­day work with the French government.

“I think the French cul­ture is really cool,” she said, not­ing the lan­guage, the his­tory and why they don’t shave them­selves, she said with a laugh. 

While never in the coun­try her­self, she has hopes to go after grad­u­a­tion or at least to visit dur­ing a study abroad experience.

Tak­ing French IV hon­ors this year, Dar­ian said she came to love the lan­guage dur­ing her fresh­man year and devel­oped a pas­sion for the cul­ture soon after. Although her for­eign lan­guage focus was on Span­ish dur­ing her mid­dle school years, when she reached high school she decided the French lan­guage would be more use­ful — 32 to 34 coun­tries in the world speak French while Span­ish is spo­ken in only 16, she noted.

Denise Dun­can has been Darian’s French teacher for the past three years and is cur­rently her French IV Hon­ors teacher. 

“Dar­ian is very out­go­ing and she is a true leader,” Dun­can said. “She is con­stantly vol­un­teer­ing her time. Our French classes are spon­sor­ing a fam­ily for Christ­mas this year, and she was the first per­son to vol­un­teer to go out shop­ping for them. She is a very hard work­ing and con­sci­en­tious student.”

Schools that Dar­ian is con­sid­er­ing next year include Boston, Xavier (where she has already been accepted) and George­town uni­ver­si­ties. She said George­town is “a shot in the dark. “But I’d hate myself if I didn’t try,” she added. “I def­i­nitely want go to an out-of-state college.”

Dar­ian recently returned home from a week in the Bahamas for a marine biol­ogy trip that she said was “kind of life-changing.”

With no elec­tron­ics, cell­phone or iPad, she lived in a cabin with cock­roaches where the toi­let didn’t always work. Yet, she said she loved the experience.

Know­ing that home will always be here, she said, makes it eas­ier to look for­ward to traveling.

BW sci­ence teacher Nadine Adams also trav­eled to the Bahamas as part of the school’s marine biol­ogy trip. Adams had Dar­ian in class as a sopho­more and found her a strong aca­d­e­mic stu­dent, but the marine biol­ogy trip allowed Adams to “watch Dar­ian as a senior inter­act­ing with her peers, many of whom were younger, in a dif­fer­ent way.

“She was a very strong, pos­i­tive role model as well as fun, enthu­si­as­tic and ener­getic. She’s taken the role along with another stu­dent of pro­duc­ing a DVD of the trip. This again speaks highly of Darian’s ini­tia­tive,” Adams said. 

Senior year has been “awe­some,” Dar­ian said. She gets out of classes early each day, but stays busy tak­ing lead­er­ship roles in sev­eral areas. She is cap­tain of Big Broth­ers Big Sis­ters and civic pres­i­dent of Leo.

Dar­ian is also involved in Sci­ence Olympiad, which is just get­ting under­way for the year. The team reached invi­ta­tion­als last year. The team is grow­ing, Dar­ian said, and the pro­gram is pretty challenging.

She also vol­un­teers teach­ing French to preschool­ers and plans to vol­un­teer at the ele­men­tary level in the near future.

In addi­tion to her classes which include French, video broad­cast­ing (where she is pro­duc­ing the Bahama mem­o­ries video along with weekly news shows), advanced place­ment psy­chol­ogy and Eng­lish, Dar­ian also works 16 hours a week at a local restaurant.

Sav­ing money from her job, Dar­ian hopes to also have an oppor­tu­nity next sum­mer to work at Boys and Girls Club of Amer­ica in Colorado.

“Hon­estly, I’m just really excited about the future,” she said. Even if she is away at school, she knows her sis­ter, who she calls her best friend, will come visit, so fam­ily will not be far away. “I’m a lit­tle ner­vous, but really excited. Yeah, it’s hard to say good-bye. I’m not good at it, so I do not think about it, she said. 

“I worked hard every year at high school and it’s paid off in the end. I have a good rep­u­ta­tion, lead­er­ship roles and 150 hours in com­mu­nity ser­vice. My goal is 200 hours.”

Her advice to oth­ers is to “stay moti­vated and look at the fin­ish line.”

Dar­ian is the daugh­ter of Andy and Kendra Alley of Galena.

Posted by Liz Robertson on Dec 9 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.