A Grade 12 student in Mountain View County still can’t believe it after recently receiving amazing news about the future of her post-secondary education.
Jules Owen-Pole from Carstairs has won the Schulich Leader Scholarship which sets her up to attend Dalhousie University. She says “It’s amazing honestly. I still can’t believe it. You know, it’s been a lot of hard work and a lot of dedication but it’s such an amazing opportunity that this scholarship has given me and for Dalhousie to be able to offer this to me, yeah I’m still in disbelief over it. It’s been really great so far and I’m looking forward to what’s going to happen in the future as well.”
Winning the coveted $100,000 dollar national scholarship will allow the 17 year old to move on from Hugh Sutherland School in the Town of Carstairs to Halifax, Nova Scotia this fall. She says “I would say my marks are, I mean, my marks are pretty average. I wasn’t valedictorian or anything. It’s kind of high 80s, low 90s but I really think my extracurriculars was what helped, especially with this scholarship. I’m heavily involved in the Cadet program, I tutor quite a bit at the school, I teach music. I think it’s really just the extracurriculars that have helped me out here as well as my amazing teachers, and mentors that have helped me grow and everything like that.”
She points out that the Air Cadets have meant everything to her. Owen-Pole says “I joined Cadets on my 12th birthday and I have just finished my sixth year, actually, with the program and I’m moving on now. Yeah, Cadets has just been the absolute best program that I ever could have joined. It’s taught me so much. I’m the person I am now, today, because of the Cadet program. It’s got so many opportunities. It’s an amazing program and I definitely owe it all to the officers and the leaders there, and the mentors that I’ve gotten out of the Cadet program.”
Owen-Pole also played a total of three of seasons of football as a wide receiver and defensive back including two years with the Kodiaks at Hugh Sutherland School.
She says the Schulich Leader Scholarship has twenty partner universities across Canada and Dalhousie was among the handful of them she had previously applied for and listed as part of her application for the scholarship. Owen-Pole explains her reaction to winning. She says “I started crying. I was so excited about it. My Dad was actually on a, he drives buses for my school, so he was on a field trip with the Grade 9 band at the time. So I called him and I said, ‘Dad I won the Schulich Leaders Scholarship.’ I promise this isn’t a prank, you know. I was still crying by that point, so he had no idea what was going on but, yeah, eventually he stared crying too. Lucky he wasn’t driving at the time but, yeah, so it was definitely very cool.”
Owen-Pole says loves mathematics as a whole and calculus is her favourite class and she has an amazing teacher – Mr. Alex Gardner – at Hugh Sutherland School.
When she goes to Dalhousie University in the fall, her focus will be Computer Science and Mathematics.