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As a freshman, Hunter Stanfield was the top student in her class. For the past two years, she has been battling with two of her classmates to be one of the top students in Valley High School’s 2021 class.

In early May, she received an email informing her that she was the No. 2 student in the class.

“It was very exciting. It was like all of your hard work has paid off, and it was worth it,” Stanfield said.

The first person she told was her mother.

Throughout her high school career, Stanfield has participated in the Valley cheer team, is the president of Mu Alpha Theta, which is a math honor society and worked at the Chambers County Development Authority, working as an ambassador.

“Cheer has probably been my favorite thing, just cheering at the football games on Friday nights,” Stanfield said. “[In Mu Alpha Theta]. we meet three times a week and tutor kids that need help.”

Along with all of her extracurricular activities, Stanfield was able to dual enroll throughout her time at Valley. With all of her dual enrollment credits, Stanfield is two credits away from being a sophomore.

“It’s been very beneficial, especially since I want to go to pharmacy school at Auburn,” Stanfield said. “Taking a year off and being able to graduate a year early will be very nice. It’s been very beneficial to get the core credits out of the way.”

While there were a lot of changes in her last 13 months in her high school career because of COVID-19, Stanfield was able to get a lot accomplished her senior year, including taking advantage of more virtual classes that helped her get ahead at Valley and in college.

“COVID took a lot of opportunities away from us. We didn’t get to finish some of our football games, we didn’t get to have any pep rallies, we missed awards day last year,” Stanfield said, “but I think the school has done a good job of trying to keep everything as normal as they can. I’m very thankful that we get to have graduation and that we were able to have awards day. It mainly messed up sports for me.”

Stanfield will attend Auburn University in the fall, where she will major in biomedical science. After she graduates with her undergraduate degree, she will return to school, seeking a pharmacy degree.

“I knew that I wanted to do something with medicine. I thought that I wanted to be a doctor at first, but then after COVID hit, I figured that pharmacy was close to staying in that field but a little bit more relaxed,” she said.