Mel Venegas: Environmentalist

From the sidelines of sports games and at the Coppell Biodiversity Center (CBC), Coppell High School senior Mel Venegas planted her legacy as a student dedicated to learning more about her community.

Venegas joined Eco Club at CHS9 and continued the activity all four years of high school, eventually becoming an officer in her senior year. Within the club, Venegas dedicated most of her time to water pH testing at the CBC.

Venegas also joined sports medicine as a freshman, an activity that she followed throughout all four years in of high school. As a senior, she works for Core Physical Therapy in Las Colinas.

To chase similar interests, Venegas took AP Biology and spent a year on the staff of The Sidekick – two activities that she cites as propelling her interests in sports medicine and plant biology, with student journalism producing an outlet for her to interview various peers and get to know them better.

She hopes that her legacy will provide CHS students with an assurance that they can try out anything they want in high school and still takeaway their biggest interests from what they do. 

“I felt so lost in my first year when I saw more experienced sports medicine students working around me,” Venegas said. “But I learned to love it, and I stuck with it. Since then, I’ve gotten to spend hours outside of [CHS] learning everything I was scared of as a freshman.”

Beyond high school, Venegas wants to become a Master Gardener of Texas and pursue gardening professionally, a title that demands hours everyday dedicated to the craft. Venegas also hopes to enter the medical field and apply her knowledge gained from years of sports medicine to support new communities.

Venegas plans to major in biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall. 

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