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Westminster Christian School senior Stella Hamann is eligible to vote in the 2024 election.
She wanted to make sure other students who are eligible learned about their rights, so she conducted a voter registration drive called Vote for Change, Your Voice Matters.
“I registered almost 200 students at my school to vote,” she says.
Hamann works hard to engage voters as a member of Activate America. She writes postcards and phone banks in English and Spanish in various states.
“I’ve done calls and postcards involving a ton of different issues such as gun violence and up-coming elections,” she says. “I wrote to voters about the senate races in 2020 and 2022. A lot of postcards are about legislation in certain areas. I write them with a script and send them out.”
She plans to major in Political Science in college. She has a head start after spending a week in Tallahassee as a member of the Senate Page Program. She assisted Florida senators and proposed new Florida laws in a mock legislative session.
“It was one of my favorite experiences that I’ve ever had in my life,” she says. “I even ended up being elected the president of senate pages and made several lifelong friends. I was given a Senate Page Passport, where several senators gave me their autographs.”
After college, she wants to be a family attorney.
“I like family law,” she says. “I want to do divorce, custody, or criminal law.”
One of the steps she’s taken to learn about the law is working on the Miami-Dade Teen Court.
“I’ve been a defense attorney and a juror,” she says.
The purpose of Teen Court is to offer teenagers an opportunity to be tried in a court full of other teenagers.
“So for teens with misdemeanors, instead of receiving a permanent mark on their record, they receive sanctions such as community service or apology letters,” she says.
She has also completed an internship at Cole Scott, and Kissane, the largest law firm in Florida.
“I mostly worked the front desk and learned how to take calls from new and returning clients,” she says. “I became very familiar with different practice areas of law as well as legal procedures.”
Her journey to becoming a lawyer includes college. She will likely attend the University of Southern California.
Hamann also volunteers for a non-profit called Ladies Empowerment and Action Program (LEAP). She spends time working at the Dragonfly Thrift Boutique in West Miami. They sell clothes, shoes and some home decorations.
At Westminster she participates in Model United Nations. She is the secretary of the National Honor Society, a member of the Science National Honor Society, the National English Honor Society, Rho Kappa, the World Language Honor Society, and Mu Alpha Theta. She is also an Emerald Scholar.
For her Advanced Placement Capstone Seminar and Research class, Hamann wrote a research paper on the relationship between Accutane and depression.
“I have had a very long journey with severe acne,” she says. “I did two years of research on Accutane on the causal relationship between depression and Accutane. Not as a side effect of the medicine, but because of the large toll acne takes on a person’s confidence, self-esteem and sociability.”
She followed six Accutane patients for multiple weeks. She found that females taking Accutane have a worse quality of life than the male patients.
“I even ended up furthering my own results with my dermatologist who offered her insights as well,” she says. “I felt I changed a lot of people’s perspective. I advocated for empathy over judgement.”
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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