Abigail Seo sees the ice as her safe space.
She’ll slip on her ice skates six mornings a week at the Greensboro Ice House. On weekdays, she’ll arrive before sunrise. She drives herself and munches on a protein bar and listens to ITZY or Dean to stay awake.
On Saturdays, though, she teaches beginning ice skaters. They all remind Abigail of herself. They want to compete. Abigail did compete and did well. She won medals. That includes a gold medal in a competition sanctioned by U.S. Figure Skating.
Today, though, she sees ice skating as more as a stress reliever from all things academic. Abigail needs it. She took 16 AP classes during her four years at Western High, from chemistry and biology to computer science to U.S. History.
She’ll graduate Saturday from Western High, and she’ll start UNC-Chapel Hill this fall. A few days before graduation, she received some great news.
She learned she’s Western High’s valedictorian, and she received from UNC the Aubrey Lee Brooks Scholarship. The scholarship will provide Abigail with $12,000 a year for her entire undergraduate career as well as $2,500 for technology expenses.
The scholarship will cover nearly all her college expenses. She now just has to decide what she wants to study. It could be business or computer science. Or she may decide to follow UNC’s pre-med track so she can become a physician assistant or physical therapist.
She really doesn’t know yet. But with whatever she chooses, Abigail has learned the importance of focus from her years practicing and performing on the ice.
Abigail can thank the 2010 Winter Olympics for that.
Abigail’s Gold Medal Journey
Abigail was 6, living with her family in the Dominican Republic when she and her family gathered around a computer screen to watch the figure skating competition during the 2010 Winter Olympics. When she did, Abigail became spellbound by Yuna Kim.
Kim was 19 and hailed from Abigail’s home country, South Korea. She skated in a sparkly blue dress, and Abigail was wowed by the beauty and elegance of what she saw. The judges were, too. Kim won for South Korea its first gold medal in figure skating.
She also won a fan.
“My parents told me the reason I wanted to do ice skating was the sparkly dresses,” Abigail says.
True. She does have six sparkly dresses for competition, and her favorite is navy blue and dark purple. But as she got older, she realized how important that moment was when she watched the 2010 Winter Olympics on the family’s computer.
“I had always wanted to be an ice ballerina,” Abigail wrote in her college essay. “Every Winter Olympics, my family and I gathered around the computer screen to cheer on the South Korean figure skater Yuna Kim. As she glided across the ice, I closed my eyes and transformed into her, wearing a sparkling dress, dancing to the music in artistic beauty.”
In 2013, Abigail moved with her family from the Dominican Republic to Greensboro. Her dad, a United Methodist minister, accepted a job with a local Korean church, and he brought his wife and their three children to the United States.
Abigail was the youngest, and when she arrived, she asked her mom to find an ice rink nearby. Her mom found the Greensboro Ice House, and at age 9, she started taking group lessons. By age 11, she was taking private lessons six mornings a week.
She soon started competing in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. She won a dozen medals. But the most memorable one came when she was 15. She competed in the juvenile category at the State Games of America in Lynchburg, Va., and she won a gold medal.
“I was very shocked,” Abigail says today. “I definitely thought other competitors had done better than I had done. But I was happy because I had worked so hard so I could go to these competitions. Just the hours of training. It was a relief for me. It made it all worth it.”
The gold medal she received is about the size of a small pancake. It’s four inches wide, and Abigail has it hanging on her bedroom wall surrounded by her photos from ice skating.
Abigail doesn’t compete anymore. Her schoolwork and extracurricular activities now take up chunks of her time. Still, her gold medal reminds her of what she can accomplish.
She wrote about that in her college essay.
“Throughout my skating journey, I viewed every fall, injury, and bruise not as signs of failure but as signs of determination and hard work.”
Abigail knows she’s far from done.
More Than Just a Skater
In the Dominican Republic, Abigail saw heartache firsthand. She accompanied her dad, their family and other missionaries to Haiti to help ease the struggle of residents living in the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Abigail and others passed out food, built a bakery and rebuilt homes, particularly after an earthquake in 2010 devastated its capital, Port-au-Prince and killed, according to some estimates, 300,000 people.
The poverty Abigail saw in Haiti scared her. Nearly 25 percent of the country’s population live on less than $1.25 a day. But her outreach beside her dad and her family helped her become more resilient and more aware of the importance of a helping hand.
She didn’t stop helping when she came to Western High.
As a member of the school’s Service Learning Club, she has participated in a variety of events such as raising money for cancer awareness and passing out red ribbons to highlight an anti-bullying campaign.
At Western High, she is busy. Abigail is also a member of the Student Council Club, the National Art Honor Society, the Spanish Honor Society and serves as president of Western High’s National Honor Society and the Science Olympiad.
At the Greensboro Korean United Methodist Church, where her dad is senior pastor, she participates in the church’s Praise Team as well as its youth group.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s made me more aware of wanting to help people,” Abigail says of her faith. “I see the problems throughout the world, and I want to help solve those problems.”
Forever An ‘Ice Ballerina’
As she gets ready for UNC-Chapel Hill, Abigail thinks about how she got there. Teachers like Sadie McCleary and Taylor Peele helped her make it to Chapel Hill.
McCleary, Western High’s former AP chemistry teacher, acted as the advisor for the school’s Science Olympiad and helped Abigail steer the club.
Peele, the school’s AP U.S. history teacher, coordinates the school’s AP program, and she helped Abigail with her college essays and college applications.
Abigail is grateful for teachers like McCleary and Peele. She’s also grateful for the Greensboro Ice House. Their ice rink helped Abigail reach her dream. She’s now helping others reach theirs.
“Rather than dreading going to practice at six in the morning, I find it is my happy place where I manage to let go of all of my stressful thoughts,” she wrote in her college essay. “Not only am I able to do what I love, but by coaching beginner skaters, I can also live selflessly, just as the coaches who once helped me live out my dream of becoming an ice ballerina.”
Who knew? Abigail did.
Original source can be found here.
