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Westminster Christian School senior Mia Wells completed her Girl Scout Gold Award project this school year. For her project, “Turning Frustration Into Education,” she worked to help victims of domestic abuse.
“I created a curriculum for my peer counseling group at school,” she says. “I worked with experts on how to support possible victims and a lot of the warning signs for the possible victims among our peers.”
She says her goal was to give information out freely so the steps to obtain the information weren’t so scary.
“To create a way to access information in a more readily available way,” she says.
Peer counselors receive training every two weeks and covers topics such as bullying and depression among others.
“The idea is to create a community where peers are able to provide others real advice while guided by professionals,” she says.
The curriculum on abuse training will be taught every year. She also posted flyers and posts around Pinecrest.
“They have a list of resources for great hotlines and centers to reach out to,” she says. “The main goal was to create awareness.”
Another area that Wells believes there should be more awareness of is the global water crisis. To combat this problem, Wells participated in two eight-day mission trips to the Dominican Republic with Blue Missions, the clean water charity.
Both trips brought water to remote villages.
“Both campos are in the mountains in the Dominican Republic,” she says. “We got in a bus and drove for three hours, and lived alongside the locals.”
Aside from the fact that there is no cell service in the remote areas, Blue Mission administrators urged everyone to live in the moment.
Wells and the other students spent their time digging trenches and laying pipes. They carried the pipes up the mountains and along the paths to where the pipeline was being laid.
The trip gave her an education on the global water crisis and the complexity of the issue.
“For me, it was a lot more how we can empower and enable people to help themselves,” she says.
Her community service includes peer tutoring, which she has been doing since her freshman year. She also started a club called Math Mentors which hosts weekly math tutoring sessions.
“It’s a way I feel I can give back to my friends or help those who might need it,” she says.
“I know what it’s like to be super stressed before a test. It’s helpful to have someone walk you through it.”
Wells will be attending Duke University in the fall. She is considering studying chemistry or neuroscience. Her interest in neuroscience and chemistry stems from seeing the treatments her aunt received before passing away from a brain tumor.
She volunteered at the Miami Cancer Institute in hopes of getting a sense of what it would be like to work in a medical setting. She has not yet decided if she will go into research or into the medical profession.
At Westminster she’s part of the Leadership Council. Along with planning events such as prom and homecoming, she was the chair of Warrior Week, the retreat for the first week of school that is held in Georgia.
Wells is president of the National Honor Society, on the executive board of the National English Honor Society and vice president of the Society of Women Engineers Next.
She takes engineering at school and is part of a group that is working on a bracelet that can find common roofies, also known as date rape drugs.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
