At 9:55 AM, I was waiting in a Zoom call for a good friend. Even though the interview was at 10, I wanted a few minutes of catching up as I hadn’t seen her in a year. At 10:03, Talis Canfield joined the call and took a few minutes to catch up with each other. Turns out, she has been extremely busy. “It’s hard because I have 2 classes at Capital; I have a zero hour and a 5th period, and that makes a really wonky schedule because we have 1st through 3rd two days a week and 4th through 6th the other two days, and SPS classes, while they haven’t had any Zoom meetings and a lot of work and sometimes the due dates can be really specific, which can be really hard to do when I have a wonky schedule and need to be in Olympia half the time. So it can be hard to manage, and half the time I have to find somewhere that I can stay and use my computer because I can’t use it at Capital. So I have to find somewhere I can do my work and it makes things harder”.

I’ve known Talis for about two years, and everyone that knows her knows she is easily one of the most hardworking people you will ever meet. It starts with Running Start, which, apparently, was not as tough of a decision as one would think. “When I was thinking about doing Running Start, I didn’t know whether or not I wanted to because I didn’t know how much I would be missing out on at Capital” she recalled with a nod “But then I realized that the only things I had really enjoyed so far took place after school because Knowledge Bowl and track practice were always after school. I could pick my own schedule and I could do the college classes and still do [Knowledge Bowl and track], so I wouldn’t be missing out on what I enjoyed”. 

Ever tried balancing out college classes with not one, but two sports, plus something like choir? Yeah, me neither. Talis, however, does. She has been in the Knowledge Bowl and track all four years. But, with choir, it gets complicated for her. “Freshman year … I didn’t get along with a lot of the girls because it became a competition setting, and I’m not a competitive person and it didn’t end well for me. So I quit, and then I came back for junior year … this year it’s been better, they’ve been nicer to me, but it’s still not the same.” So, what was the secret to keeping sanity in it all? Nobody knows, and that’s what makes Talis different. 

Even though Talis will not miss Capital, her immediate plan doesn’t have her going anywhere fast. “The plan is to do the dental assistant program here, but if I choose to specialize I would have to go to a four-year university, and at that point, I’d have to decide where I would need to go to do that, and so I’m not sure where I’m gonna go yet because after a figured that out I decided that ‘You know what? It’s too stressful to think about right now with everything else I have going on, and that’s something that I can hold off until the summer to decide’ because I don’t need to decide right this second.”