Senior Taranjit Kaur was born in a small village in India, and has faced many challenges and experiences to now be getting her diploma at Athens Drive. Once in America, Kaur had to move around a lot and was eventually separated from her siblings. Her mother, who received no education past high school, and her father, who escaped an alcoholic background, became the only family she knew. These shifts and circumstances are what drove Kaur to become the self-reliant individual that she is now, attending UNC Chapel Hill in the fall, majoring in Biology with a minor in neuroscience.
For her freshman and sophomore years of high school, Kaur attended Panther Creek High School which consisted of a very competitive student body, one that always prevented her from being recognized.
“There’s this big giant crowd that you get submerged into,” said Kaur.
Despite having one of the top GPAs in her class, and securing many board positions in extremely competitive extracurriculars such as DECA and Rock the Street Wall Street as a sophomore, Kaur always seemed to be one one step behind her fellow classmates. This changed once she moved yet again to another school her junior year.
“It was a magnet school so I expected it to be more rigorous and competitive than Panther Creek,” said Kaur, “but it wasn’t bad at all.”
Kaur was surprised once she switched to Athens Drive. The students at Athens didn’t create a heavily competitive environment like the students at Panther Creek did, which put Kaur outside of her comfort zone. There was so much more diversity and room for expansion in terms of competitive clubs that she knew she had to make her mark.
“I contacted the entire English department to try and start up the National English Honor Society,” said Kaur. “Nobody seemed to have the time for it.”
Kaur brought new clubs to Athens, including the NEHS, DECA, TSA, and the FBLA, and soon took on many board positions, resorting to the competitive environment she was so used to. Despite being introverted, Kaur found her role at Athens. She was performing well academically and took on many rigorous AP courses, determined to appreciate the sacrifices her parents made for her.
“Seeing what that did to my mom,” said Kaur. “Even now she still wishes she got that education, even just to speak English.”
Kaur finds her mother to be her main motivation for performing well in school. She believes that education provides a sense of confidence in every individual. It instills a belief that, when learning something new, given some time, anything is understandable and comprehensible. Without that knowledge, that pillar of reliability, that confidence will not come out of nowhere.
“Seeing that, and what it did to her, even after fifty years of her life, I feel like… I’ve been given all these opportunities, I need to grasp them,” said Kaur.
Kaur’s academic interest lies within the health science field. She hopes to pursue a career as a plastic surgeon to give back to her community in India. In Punjab, the village she was born in, acid attack burns are a crucial problem, and the number of attacks keeps increasing. These attacks in Punjab are mainly caused by corrosive acid which is sold so conventionally as a cleaning product.
“More regulations need to be set and that’s why I also want to go into international policy-making sometime into my college career, to mandate that,” said Kaur. “Hopefully, that’s the goal.”
With an ambitious mindset, Kaur hopes to pursue all of her dreams through higher education. The same education that her mother never received. It is her mother that stands by her in terms of Kaur’s education. Her mother, who doesn’t fully understand what a degree is, is set on helping her with her academics and ensuring that Kaur receives the education that her mother never got. Her mother puts aside the fact that she doesn’t understand what Kaur is talking about and stands by her daughter, encouraging her to achieve, achieve, achieve.
“That little thing is so profound to me,” said Kaur. “That’s what makes education so important to me.”