After waiting for two years, recipient finally receives Governor General award.

Becky Turner is the 2021-2022 recipient of the Governor General Award, which is awarded to the top student in the school for the academic year. 

The award ceremony was postponed for Turner's year because of the COVID pandemic. Turner is currently studying English at the University of Victoria.  

The reason that she choose English is because “I just really like English in general, reading and writing, and then Victoria has a really good English program, so it's been really nice being out there.” 

“It's nice to be appreciated, I appreciate that they organized it all for me still, even a couple of years later.” 

Turner explains that it is nice to have her high school work noticed, “It was a lot, there was a lot of work to get those grades and I'm quite proud of myself.” 

“It was a lot of work, but I really like school. It's my passion. I'm still doing university and enjoying that process, so it's just something that I'm naturally good at, and it's a lot of work, but I like doing it.” 

Associate Principal at Strathmore High Agnieszka Barwacz-Riou says it's pretty exciting to be able to not only have these awards coming back and be able to recognize students now, but to have alumni come back to be able to be recognized for their achievements during the pandemic. 

“Becky had a lot of challenges to kind of deal with during that academic year and still was able to maintain a very high average. Regardless of whether or not the diploma exam was written or not.” 

Barwacz-Riou expressed that she thinks that Becky would have excelled in all of her subjects. “She's just that strong of a student, and in fact, she received the top Student of the Year award since grade 10.” 

Turner was the Valedictorian for her graduating year and since that graduation just had a drive-through ceremony, Turner had a video created of her making her speech. 

“Because we have had a drive-through ceremony, there was a really awesome video that was created of Becky it was really creative and neat.” 

Turner's average for grade 11 was 94.6% and for her grade 12 year it was 95.6%. Her advice for someone that is trying to accomplish their best is “Ask more questions, people are happy to help and that’s probably what helped me the most.” 

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