From the Beaver Area School District
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” More than 150 years later, Isabella DiPietrantonio, a senior at Beaver Area School District (@BeaverAreaSD), is the very embodiment of Emerson’s sentiment; experimenting all the way to winning the Distinguished Young Women Scholarship for the state of Pennsylvania and earning the privilege of participating in the national scholarship competition in May 2021.
The Distinguished Young Women Scholarship is a national scholarship program that inspires high school girls to develop their individual potential through a transformative experience that culminates in a celebratory showcase of their accomplishments. Participating high school-aged girls are rewarded for their academic scholarship, recognized for their leadership within their community, and encouraged to develop personal talents. The academic, leadership, and talent showcase events are held at the local, regional, state, and finally the national level.
This year, Beaver Area School District’s own Isabella DiPietrantonio swept through the combined local and regional showcase events and went on to win the state level scholarship and the opportunity to compete against Distinguished Young Women (DYW) representing the other forty-nine states and the District of Columbia in the spring. The experiments that brought Isabella to the DYW competition were a lifetime in the making and crisscrossed through academic-scholarship, volunteerism, athletics, and the arts.
For the past three years, Isabella has experimented with athletics through competition on the High School Cross Country team and was thrice awarded a varsity letter. She also used her distance running ability as a member of the Beaver Area Track team, where she again earned a varsity letter.
Isabella’s natural leadership skills have been honed through her participation in student government, her organization of service and volunteer projects through the Leo Club, and her participation in the Teen Leadership Corps, an organization founded on the commitment to leading a drug free life and helping others to become their best selves. Indeed, becoming her best self has even included sharing her love of God through physical acts of community service during the summers, like performing building repairs with her youth group in West Virginia.
While academic-scholarship, athletics, and volunteerism clearly run deeply through Isabella, her happiness in life seems to manifest itself the most in the arts. Isabella was inducted into the Tri-M Music Honor Society due to her musical prowess and her participation in service projects that benefited musicians and music programs in need. During her junior year, Isabella decided to embark on a new experiment by learning to play the guitar through a semester-long course offered at the high school that began in January and was interrupted by the school closure due to COVID19. Isabella persisted with her guitar lessons despite the closure due in part to her rugged determination, but also because she had already committed to showcasing her talent at the DYW state competition by playing the guitar and singing an original song that she had yet to write. Mere weeks after picking up the guitar for the first time, she took to the stage to sing and play a song she called, “Dragonfly,” and proved yet again that “the more experiments you make the better.”
Isabella was recently featured on the Best of Beaver County radio show on WVBP. Learn more about her path to success by listening to her interview in the audio archive of WVBP for October 29, 2020.
