No matter how gifted she is, Lexi Dufficy is going to have a hard time matching her junior year at Heritage High School.
She has won enough academic competitions to fill her summer with national contests and elections. What’s more, Oprah Winfrey just picked her 500-word essay on the Holocaust as one of the best high school writings in the nation.
The essay was based on the book “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s account of surviving the Holocaust in the Auschwitz concentration camp. She wrote about why the book is still relevant today.
On Thursday, the precocious 16-year-old and 49 other essay winners appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” The 50 students were selected from more than 50,000 who entered Oprah’s National High School Essay Contest. Not only does Dufficy appear with Winfrey and Wiesel, but she was awarded a $10,000 scholarship. The taped show airs at 4 p.m. on KMGH-Ch. 7.
“Books like that make you realize how bad things can be,” she said. “It was raw and powerful, stuff that’s not taught in schools. We can’t let this happen again, like Rwanda, the Sudan or the war in Iraq. The only way we can prevent this stuff is if we become educated about it.”
Dufficy, an A student interested in studying business management at the University of Denver, has pretty lofty goals.
“I want to be like the next Donald Trump,” she said. “He controls so much money and has such an effect on business ethics. It’s interesting to me how one person can make such a difference.”
Next month, she competes in the nationals of the Technology Student Association in three categories, and she plans on competing at the state level of Future Business Leaders of America.
She likes painting, photography and writing. She used to play ice hockey but got too busy, she said. So now she’s happy just watching her boyfriend’s lacrosse games.
“I get a lot of satisfaction getting something done,” she said. “I owe it all to my parents, who never pushed me but always supported me. These types of experiences have shown me I was meant to do some things.”
Staff writer Mike McPhee can be reached at 303-820-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com.
