Val: Grace Knoer

From varsity dance team, a capella,  and volunteering with her church, senior Grace Knoer’s high school experience has covered a lot of ground involving clubs, sports, extracurriculars, and AP classes. Through the thick and thin of it all Knoer has been able to do what many people might see as impossible: maintain a 4.0 throughout all of her years at BSM.

In the beginning, Knoer found it relatively simple to maintain her 4.0, “Honestly, the first couple years, I didn’t find it that challenging. But as I started to get busier, it definitely started to get harder, and I kept increasing my class load every year and taking harder classes, and as I did that it also got harder so this year it was more difficult than when I started,” Knoer said.  

Along with taking intense classes however, her daily schedule was plagued with long hours of varsity dance team practices. The state champion dancer has made an effort, however, to alleviate some of the stress of balancing school and sports by switching from studio dance to BSM dance team. “Freshmen and sophomore year, I danced at a studio still, so I did fall dance team, and during the fall, it’s a little easier to keep your grades up because it’s the beginning of the semester and you haven’t really gotten into anything yet, so it’s not that big of a deal,” Knoer said.

Though the day to day schedule was manageable, Knoer found weekends to be a roadblock in her homework routine as they required her full focus. “With studio though it’s pretty hard because I would have competitions for full weekends and I would have 12-14 hours a day for every day for a weekend for studio competitions and then I didn’t really have time to work on homework so that got hard,” Knoer said.

After two years of this competitive studio lifestyle, Knoer decided she wanted to immerse herself in a different aspect of dance: dance team. Trying out for the winter dance team, Knoer made double varsity her first year as a junior. However, though the change was very different, it didn’t necessarily alleviate any challenges that came with balancing the two. “When I chose to do winter dance team junior year, it was still hard because winter dance team was more consistent throughout the week with long hours,” she said.

Looking back, Knoer feels that she was a bit naive in many ways when it comes to high school.“I wish that I would’ve known how to handle my schedule better because I think an important part of getting good grades is allowing yourself to have a social life and giving yourself time to relax,” Knoer said.

Knoer is planning on attending Georgetown University in Washington DC next year to pursue her dreams of becoming a surgeon. “I want to major in something medical related like biology and then be on the pre-med and then hopefully get into med school,” Knoer said.