Maya Ramsey
Ask Maya Ramsey what she’s done during her senior year of high school, and be prepared to listen for awhile.
She ticks off her numerous activities at Sprague High School in Salem: playing varsity soccer, traveling to Miami with the concert choir, volunteering to help students with developmental disabilities, participating in numerous food and clothing collection drives, being crowned queen of the school’s winter court and queen at a spring pageant to raise money for Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.
That’s all while taking rigorous academic courses, maintaining a 3.96 GPA and serving as chair of the Student Advisory Board at Willamette Academy, where she helps organize holiday events and works on ways to improve the program. She’s still working toward her next goal in life: earning a college degree. But she might take it a bit easier. “I’m thinking of just being a student for awhile, not being ‘the’ student teachers are always talking about,” she says. “I want to just be in the background.”
Maya was already a strong student when she joined Willamette Academy’s first class as a seventh-grader. It’s her personal life that has been more difficult to navigate. Neither of her parents went to college, and though they were supportive and proud when she made good grades, they weren’t the type to often ask her about school or help with homework, she says.
When Maya was a freshman, her mom had a stroke, became paralyzed on one side and developed aphasia, which impairs her ability to use words. The next year, Maya’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack, caused by his cancer treatments, after a long struggle with the disease that had left him bed-ridden. Maya was devastated, and it affected her schoolwork. For the first time, she got B’s in two of her classes instead of her usual straight A’s. “I’ve had a lot of health issues in my family, and Willamette Academy helped me keep my focus when times were hard,” she says.
Maya has been a natural leader and mentor to others at the academy. As she watched some of the younger girls rush around at last summer’s camp, getting dressed for a banquet with their parents, Maya said she enjoyed getting to know the younger students. “I like working with them and showing them how to act and be responsible. I want to be a helping hand for them.”
Adjusting to college life shouldn’t be too difficult for Maya. She chose to attend Willamette, the school she’s become so familiar with during her five years in the academy. She was also accepted to Oregon State University and the University of Oregon, but chose Willamette because of the generous financial aid offer, smaller classes and proximity to her mother, whom she still cares for and helps financially. She recently was named a Gates Millennium Scholar, a prestigious, competitive national award that will help her pay for college and possibly graduate school.
Maya’s career goals could involve medicine, social work or special education. “I know I need college to succeed in life,” Maya says. “And making my parents proud is something that’s always been important to me.”