As the school year comes to an end, seniors are deciding their college plans. Eden Webster is a senior at Mill Creek and has decided to attend West Virginia University starting this fall. Eden has lived here in Georgia her entire life and is excited to go to college and experience a new chapter of her life. “I was very adaptive when I was younger, and I still am,” said Webster when she described her future plans as an Art Therapist.  She is eager for this new change, “I feel like there is so much waiting for me there. It’s just a whole wave of emotions.” Webster recently visited the West Virginia campus and described its difference from Georgia, “It was beautiful, I mean the mountains were breathtaking, but there was this Southern charm that everybody has and it’s really interesting.”

Webster describes being close to her family and has one older sibling and three younger siblings, “I’ve gotten a lot closer to my parents during my senior year, and maybe it’s because I’m leaving soon.” Her role model is not a famous athlete or a celebrity but is instead her parents. “That might be cliché or unheard of, but the way they have lived their lives has been such a great inspiration to me. It’s a great example for me to follow in their footsteps but in my own way.”  As far as advice goes, Webster has received and remembered plenty of inspiring advice from her parents as well, “They always told me to do my best because that’s all I can do. When you think about it, you do all that you can do. Then don’t worry too much about everything because you’ve already done all that you can do.” Webster loves spending time with her family, “Especially when I would have met out of town with just my mom, and we would have these talks with just me and her about her childhood. She would tell me things that I would have never known if we didn’t have that conversation. For one time, she mentioned to me that she was valedictorian when she was younger, and I was like, “Eighteen years of living, and you have never told me this?”, but it’s definitely something I would remember.”

Growing up, Webster had no set idea of what she wanted to be as an adult, “I was an imaginative kid, and I was like I could be anything. If I could be a firefighter, I could be a firefighter. I just had this open-mindedness that had me believing that whatever works I could do my best at to succeed.”

Webster is currently set on her major being Art Therapy, “It’s a newer major, but I was interested in it and it was something that drew me to West Virginia because not a lot of schools have that major.” She loves that the Art Therapy major combines two of her favorite things, helping people and art. Webster goes on to describe her major, “It’s very similar to receiving regular therapy, but instead of talking through issues and feelings, you would express yourself through art. If people are struggling to express themselves verbally or having a hard time expressing their emotions, they would do it through art instead. It may open the door to lead them to expressing their feelings out loud.” As far as art goes, Webster overall enjoys using acrylic paint the most.

During school, Webster is a part of the African American Cultural Association Club and is taking AP Statistics and AP Art 2D Design this school year. “Senior year has been a lot of hard work for Webster, but has been her favorite year so far at Mill Creek. My four years have been filled with a lot of good people, and also a lot of hard work,” Webster mentioned.

Outside of school, she does gymnastics and practices 20 hours a week, “As far as hobbies go, I like to draw, paint, and read. You know, all the arts and crafts stuff.” Webster takes gymnastics seriously and has committed to going to Division 1 for gymnastics at West Virginia. Before receiving West Virginia’s offer, Webster did not have a specific college in mind, “I didn’t have a dream school, I had no clue where I wanted to go to college. I was just sure I didn’t want to go to Georgia.” Webster has been doing gymnastics for around 15 years and planned to go Division 1 since the start of her freshman year, “With gymnastics, when you put so much time and work into that it just made so much sense for that to be the goal. I knew I had it in me too, so I was like, why not reach for the stars?”