A young Bristol resident is getting ready for yet another academic adventure this summer.
Josephine Hatton, a Grade 10 Pontiac High School student who last year was one of 300 Canadian youth selected to participate in the Forum for Young Canadians national summit in Ottawa, is now gearing up to spend half of her summer in a rigorous pre-university program.
She’s packing her bags for the University of Alberta’s Camrose campus where she’ll join a select group of youth from across the country who have been accepted into the Shad Canada STEAM and entrepreneurship program.
Shad’s mission is to expose youth to a month of problem solving and critical thinking around some of the world’s biggest challenges, like artificial intelligence, energy supply, and food security, and encourage them to use a muti-disciplinary approach to imagining possible solutions.
“They’re trying to get you to get involved, get talking, and get ideas going in your head so you can maybe go off and do something in your community, and create a non-profit or even a business,” Hatton said, describing what she understands she’ll be stepping into.
“It’s just very exciting for me and I prefer to do that than just bike around Norway Bay all summer when I could go off to Alberta and meet people that want to go to university, do big things, and have big goals. It’s good to surround myself with that so that my goals become bigger and bigger.”
Hatton said she already knows she wants to do her undergraduate degree in public administration and then apply to law school to become a corporate lawyer, and hopes this program will move her towards these goals.
In the final weeks before she leaves for Alberta at the beginning of July, Hatton is working on the speech she has to deliver to her cohort about something she is passionate about. Her topic of choice? The importance of cats.
“I love cats so I’m going to write about how important they are and what they bring into your life,” she laughed.
She emphasized how grateful she is to the many community organizations that have offered a total of $5,500 of financial support to make this experience possible – the Shawville Rotary Club, the Shawville Lions Club, MRC Pontiac, the Municipality of Bristol, the Pontiac Women’s Institute, and the Quyon Legion. This support, combined with the $500 scholarship received from Shad, leaves her just $1,500 shy of covering the total program cost.
“It’s really nice to see the community getting behind me and backing me up, because it is such an expensive program,” she said.
Pontiac High School teacher Lindsay Woodman has been Hatton’s advisor since she was in Grade 7.
She wrote a reference letter for Hatton when she was applying to the Forum for Young Canadians last year, and again for her Shad application. Woodman is also a member of the Rotary club, which helped support Hatton financially.
“[The program] is something extremely competitive to get into, so the fact that we have a local Pontiacer get into it was huge. It was just a very nice way to support somebody local pursuing STEAM,” she said.
“If we were to look at the holistic approach focusing on body, mind and soul for development, there’s all sorts of different opportunities to be a better person, and this is just one of many ways that can be accomplished.”
