Westminster Christian School senior Valentina Stromeyer is headed to Northeastern University in the Fall as a part of the NUin program. She will be going abroad for her first semester at The American College of Thessaloniki in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece. She returns to the Boston campus for the second semester.
This school year, Stromeyer earned a spot at the regional meet in the 100 Butterfly for the first time.
She swam for the school, and she swam club for Hurricane Aquatics at the University of Miami.
The Westminster team was small, so she swam a number of events, including the 100 Butterfly and sometimes the 200 IM and the 100 Backstroke.
Stromeyer has a strong commitment to volunteering. Stromeyer and her mom volunteered with her church with the Coconut Grove Crisis Food Pantry, at the Pink Church.
“People from our church, they order food, or they purchase food,” she says. “Anyone who signs up, they get a bag.”
The bags include items such as pasta, canned veggies, fresh vegetables, and meats.
“We work with a lot of different organizations giving us food,” she says. “We provide food to the Coconut Grove community. One of our members goes out on the water in a boat and he distributes food.”
She’s been volunteering since she could remember.
“I really started getting involved during the summer of COVID,” she says. “I went then and I’d help with distribution. It was the time we had the biggest influx of people coming in.
People were losing jobs and going into poverty. We ended up getting the Amazon wish list. We got food markets to help with items that weren’t selling.”
In addition to working with the food bank, she also volunteers with the Junior Opera Guild.
“I love it. We raise money for the opera. We do this big gala. There is a lovely little church out in Homestead where we do a Christmas Day event with immigrant children.”
Junior Opera Guild members also usher at events and give awards to opera singers.
Stromeyer has also gone overseas to volunteer with Blue Mission. Teens on Blue Mission trips go to remote villages in the Dominican Republic and either build latrines or lay piping to bring water to a village. She built latrines on her mission trip.
At school, she’s a member of the Green Club.
“We used to do more beach clean-ups but now we do volunteer work with Zoo Miami,” she says.
“We went to one of the enclosures with all these beautiful birds. We scooped up all this algae in their ponds.”
She organized another Zoo Miami volunteering opportunity where they replenished the substrate of the Taperer enclosure.
“We are working on getting bird houses in the trees at our school. We are next to the Rockland pines. It’s the most diverse ecosystem in Florida,” she says. “We are going to put birdhouses for more nesting.”
Stromeyer tutors every Friday in the elementary school.
She’s also a member of Model United Nations. She says she recently went on a fun Model United Nations trip with her classmates representing the Delegation of Morocco.
“It was an international event hosted by the National High School Model United Nations in New York City,” she says. “My co-delegate and I participated in The United Nations Convention against Corruption discussing Free and Fair Elections.”
Stromeyer is a member of the Society of Women Engineers, the National Honor Arts Society, the Science National Honor Society, the Computer Science Honor Society, and the National Honor Society.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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