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Rayhaan: The student government at Sweet Home is currently in its second year. Today we talked to junior Senator Caroline Thiele about some of the things she is trying to achieve. From The Panther Eye, this is Roar.

What school activities do you participate in?

Caroline: So I participate in bioinformatics. I’m in, I’m a Junior Senator for our student government. I’m on the Unified Bowling team. I’m captain of the Girl’s Varsity Tennis team. I’m involved with Junior Class Council. I’m Part of the Sweet Home’s Captains Class.

Rayhaan: Speaking about student government, how do you feel about being a newly elected Senator?

Caroline: I feel really honored and really fortunate to be elected. This is something that I’m super passionate about and I have a lot of pride for Sweet Home, so I feel extremely happy and just honored to be elected as a Junior Senator to represent my peers.

Rayhaan: What goals do you wish to achieve in student government?

Caroline: So a big goal for me personally right now is to start the conversation about adopting a therapy dog. I think it can be really beneficial to all the students here at Sweet Home. Not only to alleviate stress and all of the wonderful things that therapy dogs have been proven to do, but to also just build school spirit and have something that we’re really proud of.

Rayhaan: What’s the progress on that?

Caroline: So the progress is that we have a plan, we have the bills of other schools who have therapy dogs and kind of how they’ve gone to do that. Like, the Williamsville schools, they have therapy dogs. So we have their I guess their rules and regulations on how they did that and we’re doing research on why it is so needed here at Sweet Home. And our next step is to actually visit those out of district schools such as, I think Williamsville North is the first one we want to go visit, just to talk to their administrators, talk to their students, how it’s impacting them. So, basically my end goal with this is to create a capstone project of why having a therapy dog is so crucial for Sweet Home and, at the end, [the] goal is to present it to the board. Hopefully, in sometime like March or April. But we’ll see.

Rayhaan: You mentioned bioinformatics previously and what career do you wish to pursue?

Caroline: So I’m interested in getting my, undergraduate in nursing. I’d like to get my bachelor’s science degree. Take the NCLEX, get my RN certification and then go back to school for two to three years and get my nurse practitional doctorate, which then I could do either primary care or I could specialize in mental health. That’s something I’ve been really interested in recently. So providing services to, people, of all ages, but especially teenagers struggling with depression and anxiety because that’s so prevalent. I think that I could really find a passion doing that.

Rayhaan: What inspired you to choose nursing?

Caroline: I think, really, nursing, I’ve kind of known that I’ve wanted it in nursing since about seventh grade because I’ve just had this compassionate care for others and I’m like, okay, what can I go into where I can take care of people? And, I was like, nursing is huge and I loved science. I’ve loved science for my entire life. And I’m like thinking, well, science is very prominent in the road to nursing. But also I have over 100 medical based volunteer hours. Every Saturday, I volunteer at a nursing home, at Degraff skilled nursing home, and I’ve accumulated over a hundred medical base volunteer hours. Not only that, but I’ve realized through doing that, that I belong in healthcare and that’s where I belong. Taking care of others.

Rayhaan: If not nursing, what other career would you be interested?

Caroline: If not nursing? I’d say, I guess my plan B, you could say, would be like a school counselor or counseling sort of field because you can still help people, but it’s not providing them with health care, which I am really passionate about. But I guess that that could be like a, a fallback plan.

Rayhaan: This episode was made by Rayhaan Saaim and Jacob Lymberopoulos. Music by Verified Picasso.

Caroline: Subscribe to Caroline’s Vlogs!