Graduate Spotlight: Savannah Duvall
KCaulder@CalhounTimes.com
Gordon Central High School senior Savannah Duvall said she looks back on high school as a time of self-discovery. Participation in extracurricular activities like Future Farmers of America helped her not only discover new things about herself and her interests, but also to plan for a future.
“My best high school memories are probably from going with my FFA teammates to competitions. That and showing pigs my senior year,” Duvall said. “FFA is the thing I will miss most about high school. I loved being able to travel and see new places, and it was really cool getting to raise my pigs and doing that to the best of my ability.”
Duvall’s experiences participating in livestock exhibitions allowed her to travel to 12 different states showing swine as a high school student. One of the competitions she remembers most fondly is Iowa-based World of Pork, which she said was the biggest show she has ever done. While Duvall did not win at World of Pork, she said the people she met there inspired her to continue competing and stay involved in agriculture as an industry.
“The people I met there were from all over the United States,” she said. “It was amazing to see how so many people could come together and relate to each other just from pigs.”
Similarly, she said FFA floriculture competitions — competitions that required her to identify plants and plant materials, judge flower arrangements and solve problems — helped her make her choice about what subjects to study at Georgia Southern University in the fall.
“Doing those competitions made me realize how much there is to do in the plant world,” Duvall said. “I am going to study biology and plant taxonomy.”
Trish Williams, the former agriculture teacher at Gordon Central, and Gordon Central Band Director Neil Crawford are two instructors who Duvall said she felt most inspired by in high school.
“They pushed me to the best of my ability and helped me understand that I need to be patient with things,”
Savannah Duvall is a senior at Gordon Central High School. She will attend Georgia Southern University in the fall. she said. “They inspired me to be a good person and to do what I love because they loved what they did, and that’s how I want to feel too.”
Other mentors came in the form of family members. Her older sister Paige
Duvall, she said, helped her get through a lot of the hard times she faced in high school. Her parents, and specifically her mother Jennifer Duvall, taught her to always strive to do her best.
“My parents really pushed me to do well and to never stop in the middle of doing something and say, ‘OK, that’s good enough.’ They taught me to push to be the best I can be and that was really important,” she said. “I like showing my little brother (Zane Duvall) that now.”
For next year’s senior class, Duvall only had one piece of advice: “You’ll want to slow down the clock but you can’t. So make the most of every day.”
“I never got to go to the last day of school, and that’s really hard. Seniors this year don’t get to see our friends one last time and tell them how awesome they are,” she said. “Make the most of it. Prom and graduation and all of that, you should really try and enjoy it because it’s the last time you get to do it.”