When Madeleine Wanker walks across the stage to receive her high school diploma, she can’t help but look back and smile.
“My freshman year, I was very reserved and really didn’t go out for many clubs,” Wanker said. “But if my freshman self could see myself now, they’d be happy I tried things and got out of my comfort zone.”
She did more than that.
Today, Wanker is one of the standouts of Iola High School’s Class of 2025, and exits with a lifetime of memories from a number of different ventures — and a perfect 4.0 grade-point average to boot.
She and her fellow graduates will be recognized at the 2 p.m. commencement Saturday at Iola High School’s gymnasium.
Wanker, daughter of Christine Tholen and Charles Wanker is enrolled to study biology starting in the fall at Kansas State University.
“It was pretty much always K-State,” she laughed. ‘“We’re a K-State over KU family. That narrowed it down for me.”
EVEN without doing much extra as a freshman, Wanker made up for it with loaded schedules the next three years.
On top of enrolling in the Kansas Scholars Curriculum, which requires students to go above and beyond the prerequisite English, math, science, social studies and foreign language classes in order to graduate, Wanker soon immersed herself in myriad extracurricular pursuits.
She joined the Student Council and the Link Crew, played in the concert, pep and jazz bands and signed up for the Students Against Destructive Decisions chapter. She also provided technical assistance to musical productions.
And then came the sports scene.
“I definitely tried a lot of different sports,” she said.
She played golf, tennis, even did track and field, without ever participating in any of them before.
She shifted from tennis to cross country as a senior, mainly as an effort to challenge herself.
“It was kind of nerve-wracking because it’s running,” she said with a grin. “But I found it was really fun.”
Wanker admittedly will never be the fastest runner on the team, “But sports to me are more about the people you’re doing it with than it is about the actual performance itself.”
Her biggest joys came from joining Student Council, which offered a behind-the-scenes look at, of all things, homecoming activities. “We got to see everything before it happens,” she explained.
In a sense, those duties helped build her school year, “to shape it how you want it to be,” Wanker said.
