Finding passion in after school activities

Serena Bettis • December 11, 2015

3090 — Alexa Smith and Natalie Spencer with their medals from a Science Olympiad competition. Photo Credit: Natalie Spencer

Finding a passion so early in life can be difficult for many people, but for Natalie Spencer, it was as simple as joining a middle school club. Spencer, a senior at Fossil Ridge High School, fell in love with science in the sixth grade at Preston Middle School. After receiving a cheesy flyer in class, she decided to check out the Science Olympiad informational meeting to see if it was something she would want to do. “I sat in the back of the room, prepared to be uninterested,” Spencer said. It surprised her, however, when she found some of the events intriguing, and started to go to the meetings. At the practices, she made new friends and gained an appreciation for science that she never had before. “The more I learned, the more I knew I didn’t know and was curious to find out,” said Spencer.

So far, Spencer has taken six science classes at Fossil, including Anatomy, AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, and Advanced Chemistry; though she still wishes she could have taken more. While Spencer is also an avid reader and member of the school’s marching band, science continues to be the one subject she can never learn enough about. Her favorite aspect is the fact that someone can never completely “master” science, and every discovery provides her with a new question. She said, “I’ve found curiosity and dedication to be the most important aspects to why I’ve been an active member for so long.”

This year, Spencer is competing in five events: Anatomy and Physiology, Fossils, Experimental Design, Green Generation, and Invasive Species. In the events she will be required to take a test, build something, or complete a lab involving information on each topic. Spencer has had great success in her events in the past, and she has been fortunate to go to the National Competition three times. Nationals, in her opinion, is the most fun as, “The team gets to celebrate how hard we’ve worked, while also competing against the top science students in the country.” Science Olympiad provides Spencer with exciting new ideas every day, and she does not know what she would do if she had decided not to participate seven years ago.

A favorite pastime of Spencer’s is to study for her events. She reads from textbooks, makes flashcards, and takes practice tests, as though she was studying for an actual class. Spencer really loves learning (and telling people) about random facts from the human body, whether they seem gross or not. She and her friend Alexa also enjoy making up raps for words they do not understand regarding anatomy.

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Without Science Olympiad, Spencer would have never thought about a career in science, and now she cannot imagine her life going any other way. It has given her the opportunity to dabble in many fields, finding ones that are most definitely not for her and others that seem like a good fit. Spencer said, “Science Olympiad allowed me to do events like Anatomy, that went from an after school activity to a genuine passion for learning about the human body.”

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.