Buckeye Valley’s Carr sets goals high

Buck­eye Val­ley High School’s Demi Carr

Story and photo by

LIZ ROBERTSON

Born and raised in Texas, Demi Carr moved to Delaware in the fifth grade and into Buck­eye Val­ley schools in the eighth grade.

The Buck­eye Val­ley senior said her last year at the school is already going by “way too fast.” She said while some­times she is stressed out, she is excited for college.

Demi’s goal is med­ical school, and she is look­ing at Otter­bein Uni­ver­sity, The Ohio State Uni­ver­sity and Bowl­ing Green State Uni­ver­sity. She is con­sid­er­ing becom­ing either a pedi­a­tri­cian or an anes­the­si­ol­o­gist. Her under­grad­u­ate focus would be biol­ogy, chem­istry or another science.

Demi lost an older brother to can­cer when she was 10 years old. She says that may have played a role in her career deci­sion, but she has always liked math and science.

“It just came to me. If I was good in Eng­lish, it would be a dif­fer­ent story. I used to want to be a vet. But I like peo­ple; I want to work with peo­ple. It’s a good cause; a respected field,” she said of the profession.

“I want to set my goals high. I get done what I aim for,” she said. “Peo­ple say it’s going to be hard, but I try my best. I think if I set my mind to it, I will get it. I have high standards.”

Demi is tak­ing advanced place­ment lit­er­a­ture, advanced place­ment lan­guage, cal­cu­lus, physics and psy­chol­ogy this year. Account­ing II is her “fun course.”

Demi is a stu­dent aide to Deana Hooper, her Eng­lish teacher.

“As a junior in senior AP Lit­er­a­ture last year, Demi showed a great deal of ini­tia­tive on projects and essays,” Hooper said. “Although she had not had the same prepa­ra­tion as her senior peers, Demi con­tributed insight to class dis­cus­sions of dif­fi­cult mate­r­ial and reg­u­larly led those dis­cus­sions. Last year she com­pleted a project on Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye. Her depth of under­stand­ing and cre­ativ­ity with this assign­ment impressed me for its refresh­ing perspective.

“This year Demi is work­ing as my stu­dent aide, and she is invalu­able. She helps me pre­pare mate­ri­als for class and lis­tens to ideas for lessons or projects. She will­ingly gives the student’s per­spec­tive so that I can tweak direc­tions or refine the com­po­nents. Her cre­ativ­ity is also ben­e­fi­cial in design­ing bul­letin boards and dec­o­rat­ing for school spirit and hol­i­days,” Hooper said.

Gery Kovatch teaches advanced place­ment cal­cu­lus and hon­ors physics. He said that Demi is “the per­son every­one would want in their class, in their group, on their team or on their pay­roll. I con­sider myself dou­bly lucky because I have Demi in two classes.”

The teacher said that Demi is “a great per­son with a won­der­ful per­son­al­ity. She is a hard-working stu­dent who han­dles obsta­cles with grace. When faced with an espe­cially dif­fi­cult prob­lem in AP Cal­cu­lus or in Hon­ors Physics, Demi is always up for the chal­lenge, and always with a smile on her face. Demi has a pos­i­tive atti­tude that notice­ably stands out, but it stands out in a sub­tle and non-obtrusive way because it’s so purely pos­i­tive — there just doesn’t seem to be any pes­simism, or defeat, or neg­a­tiv­ity in Demi’s nature at all.”

Demi tutors other high school stu­dents, mostly in math and sci­ence. She is also apply­ing for a job now that vol­ley­ball sea­son is over.

She said she is “kind of heart­bro­ken” that vol­ley­ball, a sport she began play­ing in the sev­enth grade, is now over for her.

“I’m really going to miss it — not just the game,” she said, adding that she and her team­mates were like sis­ters. “I put so much time and effort into it, and now it’s gone.”

Demi was also on the track team for a while, but found that being in both sports not only took too much time, but had her fac­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of injury due to exhaus­tion. She stopped track last year to focus just on club volleyball.

She said she may do nei­ther track nor vol­ley­ball in the spring, and just focus on school and senior activ­i­ties. And to focus on get­ting in to med­ical school, she is also con­sid­er­ing not play­ing vol­ley­ball in college.

Even with all the time in sports and stud­ies, Demi still finds time to vol­un­teer with projects through the National Honor Soci­ety. Her fam­ily also has its own fundraiser called Pen­nies from Heaven in which they all col­lect pen­nies in a jar. When the jar is full, they roll them and send them to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

She also plays Pow­der Puff foot­ball and Quidditch.

Demi said that while Quid­ditch, the game pat­terned after the Harry Pot­ter nov­els, is fun, the stu­dents also take it seriously.

“We’re here for busi­ness,” she laughed.

In the near future, Demi hopes to hang out with her friends as long as she can.

“I’ve seen these peo­ple every day for years,” Demi said. “The senior class is tight knit. We’re close.”

Demi’s advice to under­class­men is to stay in the moment.

“School rushes by so fast,” she said. “Enjoy the lit­tle things as they hap­pen. And don’t take any­thing for granted.”

Demi is the daugh­ter of Crys­tal Zehn­der and Joe Carr of Ostrander.

Posted by Liz Robertson on Nov 25 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.