Edmonton student awarded travel scholarship from Spain

An Edmonton Catholic high school student is the only Canadian in a group of students from 50 countries who have won all-expenses paid, five-week study scholarships to travel through Spain and Colombia this summer.

"I'm just really overjoyed," Daniel Mosquera Pava said Sunday. "

I'm very thankful to my family, my teachers."

Teachers notified Daniel he had won the scholarship, valued at $16,000, while he was on a school trip this month to Costa Rica, which he paid for by working last summer and saving his money.

At first, he thought his teachers were joking.

"Usually they pick the winners in March, so I was stunned it happened that quickly," Daniel said.

The Grade 11 student in the International Baccalaureate program at Louis St-Laurent School won the Ruta Quetzal-BBVA study trip, sponsored by the government of Spain, for a project he did in Spanish about Jose Celestino Mutis.

The Spanish scientist, philosopher and educator travelled from Spain to Colombia in the 18th century on a royal expedition to catalogue the region's flora and fauna, particularly for medical uses.

"He was very wise. 

He always studied. He was a doctor, he was an astronomer, he was a mathematician, a philosopher. He was also a priest," Daniel said.

Daniel's project was a mix of art and written work, with a fabriccovered box that contained a book about Mutis, a map of Mutis's travels and drawings of some of the plants Mutis examined and categorized.

"In the end it looked good, but it was a lot of work," Daniel said. Daniel's Spanish teacher, Isabel Vazquez Gil, said she broke the project down with specific deadlines for a first draft, second draft, bibliography and more because "time management is not his forte, typical of teenagers." The strategy worked.

Daniel produced an award-winning project that capitalized on his own background as a dual citizen of Canada and Colombia by exploring Mutis's life as a Spaniard who moved to Colombia, Vazquez Gil said.

"He is very proud of being Colombian and Canadian so he basically took the idea of being bicultural, bilingual and so on and put it forth in the project and, actually, that gave him part of the marks," she said.

"It took Daniel about two months to research Mutis, sifting through books at a University of Alberta library and putting the elaborate project together, she said. 

However, Daniel is not your stereotypical bookworm, Vazquez Gil said.

"He's a very popular kid in school," she said. "

He's playful, he enjoys life, he's got a full plate of things to do, but when he needs to get down to work, he does it. 

He's very popular among kids and teachers, so we were all very glad he got the award."

Daniel said he hopes to enrol in engineering at the U of A after he graduates, and eventually get a master's degree in architecture and run his own business.

He leaves on the study scholarship in June.