Olentangy’s Gancheva strives for success

Antoniya Gancheva

Story and photo by

LIZ ROBERTSON

Senior Antoniya Gancheva has been at Olen­tangy since the sixth grade. It was just two years before that when she and her fam­ily came to the United States from Bulgaria.

Today, with just a few short weeks left in her senior year, she is doing well, she said, and try­ing not to let seniori­tis get the best of her.

While there are sad moments, she is def­i­nitely ready to move on.

“I’m excited,” she said about her prospects for the future.

Antoniya will be attend­ing The Ohio State Uni­ver­sity to study pre-nursing.

Antoniya had a “torn heart,” she said, try­ing to decide between Colum­bus State Com­mu­nity Col­lege and OSU, not­ing that her fund­ing is lim­ited. But she is happy with Ohio State as her final deci­sion, where she said she thinks she will fit in, and plans to room with other nurs­ing students.

“I’m going to be doing nurs­ing for a year,” she said, after she grad­u­ates from OSU, and then return to school for her mas­ters where she will either get her CRNA, and be a nurse anes­thetist, or become a fam­ily prac­ti­tioner. Her older sis­ter is fol­low­ing the same career path, she added.

“Ever since I went to high school, I had a pas­sion for sci­ence. It makes sense to me,” Antoniya said, adding she likes being around peo­ple, help­ing people.

“Actu­ally my first dream job was a lawyer,” she said, smil­ing and not­ing she liked the tele­vi­sion show, ‘Ally McBeal.’ “Then I grew up and real­ized I was not as argu­men­ta­tive on top­ics. So it was not for me.”

With only four mem­bers of her fam­ily liv­ing in this coun­try, Antoniya said part of the rea­son she wants to go to OSU is to stay close to those fam­ily mem­bers here. The rest of her fam­ily is in Bul­garia where she was able to visit when she was in the sev­enth grade.

Bul­garia is very dif­fer­ent, she said. She had learned some Eng­lish there before com­ing to Amer­ica, but it was British Eng­lish, which is very dif­fer­ent from the way Eng­lish is spo­ken in this country.

Hav­ing left Bul­garia at a young age, she does not have a lot of mem­o­ries of life there.

With other vol­un­teer expe­ri­ence ear­lier in high school at the library and in other areas, Antoniya found her niche in reg­u­larly vol­un­teer­ing for the Coun­cil of Older Adults. She helps in the kitchen and with catering.

Besides her hours for the school’s ser­vice club, she is also a mem­ber of the National Honor Society.

She has also held down a job for the past four years. She now works at a local gro­cer, and pre­vi­ously worked in a restau­rant at a Colum­bus bowl­ing ally. Besides work­ing dur­ing the sum­mers, she also works sev­eral nights each week.

This year, she is tak­ing advanced place­ment chem­istry, physics, anatomy, Eng­lish, gov­ern­ment and cal­cu­lus. Last year, she received a 5 (the high­est mark attain­able) in advanced place­ment psy­chol­ogy and a 4 in advanced place­ment biology.

“I was excited,” she said of her test results.

She admits being seri­ous about her school work.

“I do a lot of study­ing. I like to have every­thing in order, get every­thing done,” she said.

Antoniya will miss Olen­tangy, she said, and the teach­ers and rela­tion­ships she built with them. She knows there will be new rela­tion­ships with new teach­ers, but “it will not be the same.”

“This girl deserves all that she can get,” said Rick Bay­less, guid­ance coun­selor at Olen­tangy. “She is very intel­li­gent, hard-working, con­sci­en­tious. Antoniya is a quiet leader, lead­ing by exam­ple. You could not ask for a bet­ter person/student and this is a great honor for her, and I am proud to be her guid­ance counselor.”

Marc Ehrhardt, sci­ence teacher, said, “Antoniya is one of the hard­est work­ing and con­sci­en­tious stu­dents I have had the plea­sure of work­ing with. She con­sis­tently puts forth her best effort and is a strong con­trib­u­tor when work­ing in peer groups. She holds her­self to a very high stan­dard aca­d­e­m­i­cally while main­tain­ing part time employ­ment out­side of school. She is very deserv­ing of the recognition.”

Antoniya admits she is very strict with her­self on achiev­ing good grades.

“It’s because of my fam­ily and par­ents,” she said. “I do not want to let them down; because they’re the ones who brought me here. So I strive to make them proud.”

Up until this year, Antoniya had taken art courses at the high school.

“I liked ceram­ics, throw­ing on the wheel. It’s very calm­ing.” She explained that you have your career and your hobby, which for Antoniya is art.

While there is not much time for her art this year, she is able to go to the art room dur­ing an occa­sional study hall.

Another hobby she enjoys is pho­tog­ra­phy, a pas­sion since she was a freshman.

“I usu­ally like to do close-ups in a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive,” she said.

“Antoniya is a very intel­li­gent and mature high school stu­dent and we will miss her dearly next year at OHS,” art teacher Robin Schorr said. “She is a pos­i­tive role model for our stu­dents and her hon­est char­ac­ter and easy­go­ing per­son­al­ity make her a friend to every­one. As her ceram­ics teacher, I am thrilled by her excel­lent crafts­man­ship and tech­nique. She truly excels in the clay medium. I can’t wait to see all that Antoniya accom­plishes and I wish her the best for her bright future.”

Over the next few weeks, Antoniya is look­ing for­ward to prom, grad­u­a­tion and her grad­u­a­tion party.

For now, she offers the fol­low­ing advice to oth­ers. “You need to try as hard as you can. If you fail, try again, because it will pay off in the end.”

Antoniya is the daugh­ter of Borislav Stoykov and Evelina Stoykova of Delaware.

Posted by Liz Robertson on Apr 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.