Kitchener teen lands $100,000 scholarship
‘The country has opened up in a whole new way,’ she says
KITCHENER — Debate club? As effortless as arguing a moot point.
Public speaking? Easy as shooting the breeze.
But learning to play percussion every Tuesday and Friday morning was a different, difficult musical matter for Meena Waseem. Band class took the Cameron Heights Collegiate class president — winner of a Loran leadership scholarship valued at $100,000 — out of her comfort zone.
“Band was the hardest one,” the 17-year-old Waseem said on Tuesday.
“Everyone else, you had like these kid geniuses who’d been playing since they were, I don’t know, four years old. And I’d be clapping the rhythms, practising. I wasn’t very good. But it was a lot of fun.”
But being part of a band didn’t come easily for the Pakistanborn Waseem. Her mom is a social worker. Her dad works in forestry. No one in her family, with two younger brothers, has any musical chops.
“Typically in Pakistani culture there, drums are a big thing at big celebrations but instruments are not common for starting a kid, putting them in a music class,” explained Waseem, who has lived in K-W for eight years after her family lived in Surrey, B.C., after moving to Canada.
“I am not a very good percussionist.”
But Waseem — now pondering which of 25 Canadian universities she’ll attend after earning four years of tuition waivers and a $10,000 annual stipend as one of 35 high-character Loran Award winners out of 5,000 applicants from across Canada — did her musical best to broaden her own personal development.
“I really enjoyed the crash cymbals,” the Grade 12 student said. “I’m only five-feet so I felt like it was kind of a power move, hitting crash cymbals.”
She’s not likely to take music in university. Waseem, who organized her school’s first mental health assembly, was geared toward health sciences but is now considering something in the humanities. She hasn’t decided.
But thanks to her Loran Award windfall, she can give look beyond local schools for her university education. Montreal’s McGill and the University of British Columbia are on her mind as she meets with guidance counsellors.
Such a decision, like pounding timpani drums, could lead to a headache.
“But this is a good kind of stress,” she said. “The country has opened up in a whole new way.”