Gonzaga Prep: Devyn Pirwitz works to find her voice and help the world become a better place

When Devyn Pirwitz is interested in something, she’s all in.

Environmental science is her passion, so not only does she want to study it after graduation from Gonzaga Prep, she has already jumped in – both literally and academically. And she hasn’t let her stuttering stop her from making oral presentations or pursuing her goals.

She grew up in Coeur d’Alene and moved to Spokane with her family just before she began high school. She works with the Spokane Riverkeeper on twice-yearly clean up of the Spokane River and last fall volunteered with the Lands Council planting trees in Spokane Valley.

At school she worked with an environmental group on a project trying to bring composting to Gonzaga Prep. She notes that it’s a work in progress, and that understanding among students is going to take a bit of time.

An intelligent and hard-working individual, in her sophomore year she reached out to 20 professors in the region seeking research opportunities. An academic in environmental science at Whitworth University was working at the time with a grant to model invasive species, studying the extent of which they impact native plants, and he gave her the opportunity to work on the project.

“That set me on a path,” Pirwitz said. One of the top students academically at Gonzaga Prep, she has already been accepted at the University of British Columbia, which she described as one of the best research institutions in environmental science. She has dual citizenship, she noted, because her mother is Canadian.

Not everything has been without challenge in her life, however. Having been a life-long stutterer, she found it difficult in elementary and middle school to find her voice. She has had speech therapy and said she’s just had to be confident to work through things and overcome the fear of speaking publicly.

“Because it has been tougher to speak,” she said, “the more I do it, the better I can. It’s made me braver.”

In her freshman year she tried to start a program for those who stutter and did a panel with speech and language students. She reached out to the National Stuttering Association and worked with a speech and language professor at Eastern Washington University to start a family chapter covering the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene area, offering resources and support.

So far, there are some families participating, “but we need to figure out a way to get kids more involved.”

Pirwitz does have time for other pursuits, including soccer and basketball when she was younger. Now she is a four-year varsity tennis player, No. 1 in singles at Prep, and also team captain.

She visits often with family in Canada, and was there during spring break when her grandfather died. He, too, was a stutterer, she noted.

Of the many things in her life that have made a big impression, she remembers a trip to Norway and was shocked at how clean and sustainable she found everything. There were solar panels on houses and businesses and very little plastic in use. “I hope someday we can get our cities to be like that,” she said,

She may go into environmental law, but that decision is yet to come. “I just hope to leave the world a better place and help us take care of what we have.”