Westside senior Amisha Subedi was recently named Runza Student of the Week. 

This distinguished honor is awarded to high school seniors across Nebraska who demonstrate achievement in both the classroom, and their community. Winners receive a $500 college scholarship and are featured on a weekly KETV news segment.

Students must be nominated by a member of their community for the award. Counselor Zach Maloley, who nominated Subedi for the award, said the honor is well deserved.

“I think that Amisha sometimes is overlooked with how much she does for all these different organizations,” Maloley said. “If you take Amisha out of the equation, they would fail. She is just the center point of these organizations that she doesn’t get very much credit for. She’s amazing.”

Maloley said that a variety of staff members also took part in the nomination process.

“So what happened is I got [an email] from [Athletic Director Tom] Kerkman and [Counselor Vicki] Londer asking about any students that we would want to nominate for that,” Maloley said. “So, I wanted to nominate her. I also sent out an email to other teachers asking if they wanted to nominate her too, and like a million teachers also wanted to, so a lot of teachers nominated her for this because she’s amazing.”

Maloley said the news segment will be recorded at Westside.

“KETV is coming to Westside January 10 to record her,” Maloley said. “They wanted specific things, like to see her with the Hope Squad and to see her in choir, so they’re going to come and film her doing those different things.”

Subedi explained how she discovered she had won the award.

“Mr. Maloley sent me an email saying I had to go to his office right away in the morning, and I thought I was in trouble,” Subedi said. “I showed up Mod 3 and he told me to read an email, and I read it and it said, ‘Congratulations! Amisha is the next student of the week,’ so that’s how I found out.”

Subedi said she appreciates the recognition of all her hard work outside of the classroom.

“I feel like to me, it means that I’m finally getting recognized for all that I put in outside of school and being at home,” Subedi said. “It’s just one of those things that validates you I guess. It just makes me feel better knowing that someone else knows how much I do. I feel like I put in a lot of my time volunteering and helping others out, and I don’t do it for the recognition, but it feels good to be recognized.”

 Subedi said she is excited to use the $500 scholarship for her college education.

“I’ll put the scholarship money towards college,” Subedi said. “I have a couple ideas of where I’m going, but nothing final.”

Subedi said her biggest challenge between balancing schoolwork and her activities is figuring out what to prioritize. 

“[The most difficult thing to do] is prioritizing things,” Subedi said. “Sometimes you have to prioritize things that you don’t want to do because they are more important, and it’s really hard to do things you don’t want to do.”