Hanna is the only high school student in the nation to be awarded the National ACT Student Readiness Exemplar Award, each receiving a total of $5,000. In her application, Hanna chose to highlight the connection she has with her community and her commitment to always finding the silver lining.
“I focused on, despite living in a small community, we can still take advantage of our opportunities,” said Hanna. “We can take advantage of every opportunity, stretch our comfort zone with leadership roles, and incorporate cultural values.”
Hanna comes from a small village of about 200 and took charge of her education early on. In tenth grade she applied to the Lower Kuskokwim School Districts’ Ready Academies, a program targeted to village students for specific career tracks. Hanna got into the STEM Ready Academy program, and from there, began to build on a wide array of interests from journalism to film directing and then to robotics.
It was while she was on the Bethel robotics team, the SunChasers, that she started working closely with coach and mentor, Vicki Nechodomu, an LKSD Education Specialist, who says she was impressed by Hanna’s level of dedication.
“She wrote letters of sponsorship to Ravn, who sponsored flying her in occasionally on the weekends to practice,” said Nechodomu.
“She was always coming up with out of the box solutions of how to participate. We were doing a fundraising activity, and I didn’t know how to involve Jayne from long distance, in Mekoryuk. And she said, ‘What if I write a letter of sponsorship to the store here requesting baking goods? Then I’ll go and bake baked goods, and then the junior high cross-country team is flying in tomorrow, so I’ll give those to the junior high cross country team coach, and he’ll give them to you, and you can go with the rest of the team and sell them at the Saturday Market.’”
Hanna also had generous travelers help her get robotic components for the SunChasers' projects to Bethel. According to Nechodomu, it’s not just her dedication to following through to makes Hanna stand out, but her brilliance at problem solving that extends beyond the norm.
“When she joined the robotics team two years ago, she’d never used a drill before, and by the end of that season she was drawing detailed mechanical concepts and prototyping, and had built the most crucial element of the team’s robot,” said Nechodomu.
“She was using jigsaws, thermoformers and presenting to judges at a state level competition. Their team won an award for the robot design, with recognition of that one component she built as being a crucial part of their award."
After graduation, Hanna is looking forward to attending Biola University, a Christian college in Southern California, this fall. She plans to get her Bachelors degree in Mathematics, followed by a Masters degree in secondary education.
Eventually, she’d like to return to teach for Lower Kuskokwim School District, and hopefully she says, within her village.
Correction: an earlier draft of this story said that Hanna was one of four students to win the award, when she in fact was the only national winner.