Dryden senior awarded prestigious scholarship

Dryden High School senior Erin Joy Peck was recently selected to receive a $750 Janet H. Griswold Scholarship from the P.E.O. Foundation, a nonprofit corporation established in 1961 that focuses on helping women “reach for the stars,” according to its website (peointernational.org/peo-foundation).

Peck was recommended by P.E.O. Chapter B of Newark Valley, New York. The competitive Janet H. Griswold Scholarship is for “women who exhibit excellence in leadership, academics, extracurricular activities, community service and potential for future success,” according to a recent press release from P.E.O.

Peck is currently ranked in the top 10 of her graduating class and has received numerous accolades in the past. In the spring of 2020, she was awarded the University of Rochester Xerox Award for Technology and Innovation. She has also had her work exhibited in the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York.

She’s also participated in All-County Chorus and NYSSMA and is part of her local community theater company. She was the stage manager for Dryden High School’s production of “Seussical” in 2020, after which she was awarded the Cortland Repertory Theater Pavilion Award for technical theater.

Peck explained that she’s long had her hands in multiple interest areas, from sports to STEM subjects to art. For sports, Peck is on the Dryden High School soccer team and has often played baseball with her family.

Peck said math and science remain her favorite school subjects because “I’ve always just had a math brain.”

“I could do math really fast in my head. I really like that,” she said. “And then in high school, my two math teachers were actually married. They have been some really important people to me. I nanny for them now, so they kind of got me in, and I would hang out in their room, and we would do extra math problems. And same with our science. Our science department at Dryden is really cool. And I’m in advanced for both of those.”

In her essay for the scholarship, Peck described how many people in her life influenced her wide array of interests. For the arts and music, her biggest inspiration is her parents.

“My mom is the one who has always been the art, and my dad the music,” she said. “So, my mom is a really good artist. I have her art in my room. And so, I grew up loving to paint. And Mom used to say I loved to cut and glue pieces of paper when I was little. It was my favorite thing to do.”

While Peck continues to paint, she’s shifted much of her art focus nowadays to digital and film photography, which blended nicely into her theater interests.

“I’ve gotten, this year, to work with not just digital photography, but film photography, which has been really cool to kind of learn the background of it,” she said. “And it just interests me so much. Right now, we take advantage and we just take a photo, but to learn how to load the film and develop the film has been so cool. And it’s such a part of me, and I really want to continue with it.”

Peck’s interest in the behind-the-scenes side of theater comes largely from her experience working with the youth theater company Running to Places (RTP) in Ithaca, where she stage managed her first show — “Mama Mia” — in the summer of 2019.

“I got to work at the State Theatre with RTP, and I felt like, as the stage manager, that I got to do every part of theater,” she said. “I got to do art. I got to do science and math, trying to figure out timing and all that stuff. And I felt like stage managing and technical theater just incorporated every part of myself in a great way.”

That interest is largely why she’ll be pursuing theater arts, with a concentration in stage managing, at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. But that’s not the only reason she went with Drew. Several members of Peck’s family attended Drew, and Peck was blown away by the scenery surrounding the university, being a wooded 186-acre campus. On top of that, Drew is a liberal arts school, which allows Peck to pursue all of her interests at once.

Once out of Drew, Peck plans to do stage management for a while, with the long-term goal of opening a school or youth theater company to teach kids technical theater.

“I wish I learned it before high school, so I kind of want to introduce kids to that,” she said. “There’s lots of places that little kids can learn to act, but no one knows how to use a light system until college normally. I just learned this year, so I want to help kids see what I love about it.”

The Janet H. Griswold Scholarship will help pay for Peck’s books and other supplies at Drew, she said. Beyond the funds, though, just winning the scholarship meant a lot to Peck. She applied for the scholarship back in November and finally heard that she’d been accepted in April 2021.

“Random Tuesday, I woke up with an email that said, ‘Congratulations!’” she said. “It was exciting. … And it’s cool [that] this P.E.O. organization is now going to follow me forever, and I have a group of women that’s going to help me. So, it’s really exciting. And I can keep applying for the next four years.”

Peck said Drew should be a nice relief from what has been a rough senior year under the pandemic. At the end of her junior year, when pandemic shutdowns first took effect, Peck had a fairly positive experience, as an exchange student from France that she was hosting got to stay an extra three months and her brother got to come home during the lockdown. But her senior year has been different, as she explained.

“I have gone to an only child all of a sudden — my brother has his own house now,” she said. “So, this has been weird, and it’s not the senior year I expected at all. But I’m glad I get to go at least some in person. But my classes are very different. I feel like there’s so many people that I’ve kind of forgotten about in school because I don’t see them.”

The school side of things has actually been easier for Peck during the pandemic because it’s cut down on much of her workload. What took the biggest hit, however, was theater.

“When we shut down last March, I had four shows scheduled for March, and then June, and then August and December, back-to-back shows all scheduled,” she said. “So, this has been really weird for that. But I’ve tried to make the most of it and see friends.”

Now, Peck’s eyes are focused on the months ahead. She plans to spend her last summer in Dryden with friends and family and is looking forward to the next leg in her journey.

“I’m very excited to go to New Jersey and be by the city,” she said. “I’m hoping to see a Broadway show when it opens up in September and meet a lot of new friends and just immerse in the community at Drew. And I really want to try and make the best of the next four or five months, however many months I left. The beginning [of COVID-19] wasn’t so good with everything, and senior year wasn’t great, but I’m excited to go to college and have this scholarship to help me.”