Bishop Seabury Academy

4 Poultry, Teamwork Helped Shape Hilary Griggs, the Journal-World's 2019 Academic All-Star Excerpts from the Lawrence Journal-World by Mackenzie Clark Student band ROCKED it! Congrats to our powerlifters. Faculty band (still) rockin' it. H ilary Griggs '19 is willing to rise to meet challenges—or stoop to them, if that's what the job requires. The Yale-bound Bishop Seabury Academy senior said she knows it's a little bit cliché, but her birds have taught her a lot about the value of hard work. Griggs, 18, said her family first welcomed chickens into her backyard when she was 9 or 10 years old, jumping into the "urban chicken craze." They started small—about six birds—but she and her younger brothers don't really like to do things at a bare minimum, she said. A glance at her application to the Journal- World's Academic All-Stars program confirms that indeed, Griggs pours herself into her passions. The long list of distinctions, alongside eloquent essays and a transcript that doesn't bear even a single A-minus and cumulates into a 4.41 GPA, leaves no question why a panel of judges selected her for the award and $500 scholarship. A foundation of hard work Among other accolades, Griggs is a debate team captain, editor-in-chief of her school's newspaper, National Merit Finalist and prefect—one of five seniors elected by faculty and the student body to fulfill leadership duties at the school and manage morning meetings and lunch. But before she gets to those duties each day— not to mention her classes, which include honors calculus II, Latin V and wilderness biology— she has to care for her "poultry menagerie." It comprises approximately 50 birds: bantam chickens, Bourbon Red turkeys, Saxony ducks, Iranian tumbler pigeons, assorted laying hens and, most importantly, her turkey, Johnny Vegas. Building a team Griggs said that among the many activities, awards and leadership positions she listed in her All-Star application, she thinks her greatest accomplishment was "building a program that's now really meaningful to a lot of students, from the ground up." By the time she reached her freshman year, there hadn't been a debate team at Seabury for a few years, Griggs said. So she, a friend, and a math teacher who had a bit of previous experience with debate started one. That first year, the four team members took third place in four-speaker for Class 3-2-1A at the Kansas State Debate Championship. Now, Griggs said, the team includes about 25 members. Griggs went on to win the state championship as half of a two- speaker team alongside her partner, Chloe Akers, during their sophomore year. The duo got second place at state in 2018 and 2019, and the school's four- speaker team (Joshua Meschke, Morgan Orozco, Audrey Nguyen- Hoang and Lyle Griggs) also took second place this year. "Debate has probably been the most formative activity for me in high school, just teaching me so many things—not just about communication and public speaking, but also about working as a team, and all the other components that go into debating," Griggs said. It's not always about winning, though, and Griggs has faced her share of defeat. She's played for the school's varsity basketball team all four years, as a captain her senior year. She was actually voted MVP this year, "but anyone who knows me knows that I'm really not good at basketball at all," she said, laughing. "Being on a team like that, not winning and not being successful, was definitely difficult," Griggs said, "but it also taught me a lot about, again, determination and teamwork, even though it was very frustrating at times." Heading to Yale Griggs was accepted early into Yale University. According to the school's website, its acceptance rate for the class of 2022 was just 6.3%. She was also selected to participate in Directed Studies, which "offers a select group of first-year students an intense interdisciplinary introduction to some of the seminal texts of Western civilization," according to the program website at directedstudies.yale.edu. Griggs explained that it's a very reading- and writing-heavy program that appeals to her interest in the humanities. "It's very rigorous, but it's right up my alley, and so I'm really excited to be a part of that," Griggs said. She's not quite set on her career path yet, but Griggs said in addition to the humanities, literature, philosophy and political science, she is interested in law.

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