Timberlake graduate’s world lens shaped early in life

Timberlake High School’s Maurie Roth loves to see new places and meet new people – a love for travel she began developing when she was in eighth grade and spent time with her grandparents on their mission to Samoa.

The only daughter among the five children of Kimberli Roth, a reading aide at Twin Lakes Elementary School, and Travis Roth, a pharmaceutical production manager, she said that having experiences in other cultures expands horizons and helps a person be appreciative.

Her horizons were expanded for her sophomore year when her father’s work took the family to Denmark. She attended a school in which her classmates came from Denmark, South Africa, Spain, Russia, China, Vietnam, Lithuania and all across the globe.

“Not only was I the only American in my class, but I was the only one who only spoke one language,” she said. The curriculum, which included 11 classes, was rigorous, and she studied English, Danish, Latin, two different histories, the French and American Revolutions and more. “I became much more politically aware.”

Always a good student – she will be one of Timberlake’s valedictorians this month, with her 4.17 GPA – she took the opportunity to learn all she could, as she has done on other travels. She recalled a bicycle trip in Italy that same year when the family was on a hill from which Leonardo DaVinci tested one of his flying devices.

One happy benefit from the Danish experience is that a student she met there is spending a year living with the Roth family and attending school here.

She is active in the youth group at her Mormon Church, where she has been involved with projects to clean up the highways and provide meals for families. She loves to hang out with friends and enjoy lake activities with her family. She also enjoys performing on piano and has picked up ukulele-playing as well. “I’ve always loved the tropic vibe.”

In school, Roth is a member of the National Honor Society, captain of varsity soccer, manager of the girls’ basketball team and involved with Teens Against Tobacco Use. Last fall she competed at the state level in Idaho Falls in Distinguished Young Women, a national scholarship program in which students are judged on a variety of skills – interview, scholastics, talent, fitness and self-expression. Roth won the scholastic and interview portions and was judged winner overall, securing for herself a college scholarship.

This fall she will be attending Brigham Young University, as her parents did before her, and where her older brother is now enrolled. She hopes eventually for a career in photography or journalism, or both. To help get herself there, she works making pizza at Embers by the Lake in Hauser and is a food and beverage cashier at Silverwood. She also has held other jobs.

“A big percentage of paying for college falls on me, so the scholarships and jobs certainly help,” she said.

And she’s looking forward. She has already signed up to teach English at an orphanage in Thailand in the summer of 2018.