Winchester High's Caroline Pierce is $10,000 McKeown Scholar

Winchester High School has selected graduating senior Caroline Pierce as this year’s McKeown Scholar. Pierce topped 21 classmates to earn the honor, which is accompanied by a $10,000 merit scholarship to be applied to the four-year college or university of her choice.

Pierce will be recognized during Senior Awards Night at the Winchester High School auditorium on Wednesday, May 16 at 7:30 p.m. Winchester resident Denise McKeown, widow of Jamie McKeown, for whom the award is named, will present Pierce with a framed certificate.

The McKeown Scholars competition, now in its 16^th year, is sponsored by Woburn-based Cummings Foundation. According to Joel Swets, the Foundation’s executive director, “Caroline offers an impressive combination of academic achievement, extracurricular activities, community involvement, and writing ability. We are delighted to recognize her with the McKeown Scholarship.”

Outside of academics, Pierce spends time playing with the varsity softball team and singing with the school’s a capella group, The Octets. She also works part-time with her father at John A. Pierce Insurance Agency on Main Street in Winchester, and occasionally volunteers at St. Mary’s Parish.

Winchester’s high school seniors in the top 20 percent of their class were invited to participate in the McKeown Scholars competition, which began on March 7 with a written essay under exam conditions at Winchester High School. Staff from the school’s English Department evaluated the anonymous essays and selected the top three as finalists for the award. The winner was determined based on overall essay quality, application packet, community service record, outstanding reputation, and a personal interview.

This year’s essay question (included in its entirety below) asked students to discuss whether a generation gap currently exists. Pierce wrote persuasively that rapidly changing technology has created new opportunities, as well as higher expectations, for today’s youth. She also noted high-tech hazards faced for the first time by this generation, including cyber bullying and Internet predators.

Pierce said, “I thought the question was very relevant. People sometimes disassociate themselves from other generations, but we all need to work together.”

The McKeown Scholars Program was established in 1996 in memory of James L. McKeown, late president of Cummings Properties and a Winchester resident at the time of his sudden death at age 41. McKeown left a wife, Denise, and two young daughters, Molly and Kelly. Having been much admired for his fairness and integrity in business and personal dealings, the loss of McKeown was mourned throughout the Boston area. Following his death, Woburn honored him with the naming of the James L. McKeown Memorial Interchange over I-93, and the city of Beverly dedicated the James L. McKeown Elementary School in his memory.

2012 McKeown Scholar essay topic

Do you believe there is a generation gap?  Describe the differences between your generation and others.

Essay by 2012 McKeown Scholar Caroline Pierce

(unedited from original submission)

Trying to explain to a parent how to send a text message or “tweet” can get rather tedious, and the phrase “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” becomes painfully apparent.  The generation gap, emphasized by the quickly growing world of technology, is not only an annoyance, but can greatly threaten our well-being.  Technology is the main divide between our generation and others because we are the first to fully experience individualized electronics such as laptops and cell-phones.  Technology has given our generation more opportunities than it has previous generations, but it leaves much more to be expected of us.

Thanks to new technology, the ease with which our generation can learn is unlike ever before.  The Internet allows us to seek answers to specific questions that might have been a half-hour search in a thick encyclopedia for my parents.  Microsoft Word documents enable rewriting a sentence fifty times if desired, whereas my mother would have had to start over each time on her typewriter.  Even hand-writing, which is a slower technique and leads inevitably to hand-cramps, is becoming obsolete as more classrooms are given grants to purchase laptops.  Moreover, if during our research we stumble upon something interesting, we can post a link to it on any social networking site so that others can share in our discovery just moments later.  This allows us to draw from the wealth of knowledge of all our peers, and to grow from each other faster than ever before.

Yet this technology provides another distinction between our generation and those before us: much more seems to be expected from us.  Teachers can ask us for longer essays because they know we can type them up more quickly than older generations could with typewriters or could write by hand.  Furthermore, the speed through which information travels, while potentially wonderful, means that our brains must process information even faster.  Lastly, we are expected to be “plugged-in” at all times.  For example, most people never turn their phones off, but even leave them on beside their bed at night.  A similar phenomenon occurs with Facebook, wherein you are expected to check your account regularly for messages and updates.  Likewise, if you have not seen the latest video that a friend has posted, you are isolated from conversation while it is discussed.  Individualized electronics like computers may allow for easier communication and research for our generation, but they also become a sort of living being that has to be fed and cared for, and this takes a lot of time and energy.

Furthermore, the rapid growth of technology demands that our generation must be more prudent than generations before.  The Internet is not only filled with research material, but also with media of disturbing content.  Sometimes you are not even aware of what exactly you are going to see until you click the link, at which point you could be terribly disturbed.  Even more dangerous and deceitful are internet predators, who pretend to be young kids in order to befriend teenagers and convince them to meet face-to-face.  Before the Internet, what you saw was, for the most part, what you got, and could judge upon your instincts whether or not a person was trustworthy.  With the guise of the internet, however, these predators can take on a very believable persona.  Cyber-bullies also abuse new technologies, sending hateful texts and emails with anonymity and from the safety of their own homes.  Therefore a great responsibility is placed on our generation to be more cautious, because the world is more readily at our fingertips than it was for past generations, leaving us more vulnerable.

Overall, the generation gap is unmistakable due to the incredible distinction between the technology of today and that of yesterday.  Our generation has the advantage of being able to research with greater ease.  Yet we also are bogged down with the responsibility of keeping up with the ever-growing technological world and with maintaining our safety while facing Internet hazards.  Past generations may have had to work harder to obtain information, but they also did not have to deal with the same dangers that we face.  It is not a question of which generation had it easier, but instead it is the idea that each generation has its own advantages and disadvantages, and this is something we must recognize so as not to feel inferior or superior to any other generation.  If we fully realize this idea, we may learn from each other and unite in the face of the inevitable generation gap.