LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Valentina Moreno is mature beyond her year and it starts with smarts. The senior from Louisville has a 4.0 grade point average in the highly demanding International Baccalaureate program at Sacred Heart Academy. She was awarded the University of Louisville Yarmuth Book Award for “academic promise and intellectual curiosity.” She also scored a 34 on the ACT and will attend Yale University this fall.
Physics teacher Will Garcia says she is a joy to teach, pointing out, “She is astoundingly self-actualized for a high school student. She’s not there to get good grades; grades are just a byproduct of her hard work. You know, she cares about why things work, she cares about doing good. We can have full conversations about what’s going on in the world that you don’t typically see from other high school students. She has a vision that goes beyond herself and Louisville, Kentucky. If every student was like Valon, there wouldn’t be a teacher shortage.”
Moreno’s intelligence is matched by her commitment to the community with hundreds of hours of service, including a passion for one specific area.
She said, “I was born and raised here in Louisville, but a very significant part of my identity is that my parents are both Colombian immigrants and I have visited Colombia almost every year and I still am very close to my family back in Colombia. I’m very in touch with my culture, so I think that has really influenced me and that has really cleared up my vision of the things that you can do to help others and to help reach your final goal. I think that with my identity as the daughter of two Colombian immigrants, I’ve really known from the start that there is something greater that I can do to help others, specifically with a community that’s very close to my heart. Whatever I can do to help immigrants and refugees, I think that that’s really been there from the beginning just because I’ve grown up like that.”
Moreno is bilingual and uses that skill to tutor local Hispanic children. She also works with Kentucky Refugee Ministries to help people from Cuba and Haiti. She even did a month-long internship in Sweden to understand issues facing immigrants from Middle Eastern countries. That’s given her a unique perspective:
“I’ve been able to see first-hand asylum seekers and their struggle to find work and to get their files processed and just the application process, in general. I’ve learned in the past years how complex it is and how intertwined everything is. If you’re an immigrant who speaks Spanish or speaks another language and is struggling with English and just came to a new nation with a new culture and is still grappling with maybe some type of trauma from your home country, entering into the immigration system and seeing how complex everything is. It’s extremely difficult,” she said.
Her goal is to continue to learn — and then use that knowledge to make a difference.
She explained, “I am planning on majoring in international relations and taking an interdisciplinary approach to international relations. So learning about languages and history and statistics, literature and the culture and using all of those to formulate my understanding of international relations. And I think that will all grow into, hopefully, me working with immigration policy somehow and helping the immigrant community. Ideally, I would love to make some concrete change to help with immigration policy. So we can ensure that immigrants and refugees that are seeking refuge, are able to have that refuge and are able to be treated justly and like in an equitable manner in their host country.”
Garcia says Moreno’s desire to give back is commendable.
He said, “I think the thing that’s great is that Val wants to make everybody else around her better. She’s very reticent to say like, ‘Oh I’m gonna go change the world. It’s like I want to help change the world, but I want to make sure that everyone else can change the world too.’ She’s very focused on building community and not focus about herself, which I think in the age of social media and the age that we have a perception of the younger generation about being me, me, me, me, me, whereas I think she gives great hope that it’s not all about individuals but there are people that care about the community going forward.”
It seems clear Moreno will be a difference-maker. The only question is how.
She told Spectrum News 1, “I would like to make a positive impact on the world and anyway that I do that, if it’s just being able to help one person’s life or alleviate someone’s situation, I would be content with that. And I would think that that made the world a better place. I’m not searching for a future where I am making executive decisions by myself and thinking that I’m bettering the world or making the world a better place just by myself. But I do hope to be a part of a community or working with other people that have the goal and have the mission to make the world a better place.”
She’s well on her way to doing that and it’s why Valentina Moreno is a deserving Spectrum News 1 High School Scholar.