New view of ‘waste’
Walker, late bloomer, now major achiever
Among all the highest achieving West Knox County high school students, from August of their freshman year until graduation day in Thompson-Boling Arena, Tara Walker was, let’s say, a late bloomer.
While Walker admits to underachieving through her junior year at Hardin Valley Academy — a 2013 HVA graduate with a 3.50 grade point average — whatever waste of talent those years encompassed are being made up in preparation to deal with the world’s “waste.”
“I really like to work in wastewater treatment because water is a resource that we will always have to have. And there’s been so much previous [pollution], like things dumped into our streams and lakes that at the time, some of it wasn’t known how bad it was,” said Walker, pursuing a chemical engineer major, who is one of 14 female Engineering Technology students at Pellissippi State to have earned scholarships funded through Tennessee Community College Space Grant Consortium, which is part of NASA Solicitation and Proposal Integrated Review and Evaluation System program — and one of two such honorees who will cross the stage during PSCC commencement ceremony Friday, May 5.
“If we don’t clean up our water, and it continues to get dirtier and dirtier, it’s hurting ecosystems and it’s hurting the people,” Walker added.
Approaching her senior year at HVA, “I just realized that school actually is important,” Walker, now 22, said. “To be able to do what I want to do with my life I needed to get serious about it. … My senior year I made almost all A’s. And I took some harder classes my senior year.”
Turning down The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, University of Alabama and the University of South Carolina, Walker will attend Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, and major in chemical engineering.
Tech was the choice because “it’s smaller than a lot of other four-year universities. And it’s really, really well know for turning out good engineers,” Walker said.
Helping Walker grow was the PSCC environment. “The teachers at Pellissippi are fantastic,” she said. “All of them are there because they want to be there. They want to teach and they want to help you.”
With “my math teachers, I want to be in class every single day,” Walker added.
Individually, “I had the dean of the Natural Behavioral Sciences teach one of my chemistry classes and he was awesome,” Walker said about Dr. Kane Barker.
“And Dr. Patricia Zingg, everybody that I talked to before I had her told me how fantastic she was. I got the privilege of taking her for organic [chemistry], and she has just been fantastic,” Walker added. “She makes time for all of her students in office hours. Before a test on Tuesday, we have a review on Saturday or Sunday morning, sometimes both. She is just so available to help you in any way she can.”
In addition to her TCC Space Grant Consortium Scholarship, “I had my Hope Scholarship. And tnAchieves paid everything else tuition-wise and all I had to pay for was books for my first five semesters at Pellissippi,” Walker said.
