by Joel Strottrup
Contributing Writer
Danielle “Dani” Johnson, valedictorian of this year’s approximately 130-member Zimmerman High School senior class, realized while petting a horse in Door County, Wisconsin, last summer that she wanted become a large-animal veterinarian.
Submitted photo
A flute player, Danielle Johnson plans to become a veterinarian.
Johnson, 17, had already wanted to become a veterinarian, but it was for companion animals like dogs and cats. But as she stood stroking the horse, she thought about large animals, such as horses and cows. People have forgotten how important they are in the economy, providing meat and milk, but also in people’s daily lives in other ways, she said. Another reason for becoming a large-animal veterinarian is that as few as 8 percent of veterinarians specialize in large animals, she added.
She did not grow up on a farm but did go to horse camps during some summers as a preteen in Zimmerman. Johnson, the daughter of Debbie Dybwad and Brad Johnson, has a brother and a sister, now 21 and 24 respectively. Johnson, who enjoys reading, walking and running, said she is the only valedictorian in her family tree.
She was a flute player in the school’s Wind Symphony and it brought her a particular school highlight. The seniors in Wind Symphony were assigned to practice “Overture Jubiloso” and one day were rehearsing it without their director, Tim Smith, because he was repairing an instrument. Soon the other band members joined in to play it.
“It was amazing to feel so connected to my fellow classmates as we played the song,” she recalled. “We had some rough patches, but we were able to make it through the entirety of the song, which we had not yet done.”
Johnson, who will be attending the University of Minnesota in the fall, already has many college credits from taking advanced placement classes. If the results of her most recent AP tests turn out as well as her past ones, she could be a semester away from being a college junior, she said.
Johnson was also in speech, jazz band, pep band, swimming and National Honor Society in high school and was part of a leadership group called LINK crew, and tutored sixth-grade flute players. She had to get out of activities after a certain point, she said, to get a job to pay for car insurance, gas and other expenses. Besides various academic awards, she was band student of the year in her junior and senior years and was student of the year as a senior.
Her favorite activities and classes were Wind Symphony, AP U.S. history, AP physics, AP English language and composition, and AP English literature and composition.
Becoming a valedictorian has been her goal since she listened to a valedictorian’s speech during her sister’s high school graduation in 2009. Johnson said she kept tabs on the other top GPA students at Zimmerman High but felt that if another should be named valedictorian, they would “obviously deserve it.”
“They are all great people,” she added, “and I believe they made me stronger as a person as we struggled through many advanced classes together.”
Johnson’s most enjoyable academic projects included when she and another flute player taught themselves how to play various musical compositions as flute duets. She also enjoyed the History Day Project.
“I sometimes don’t believe I’m actually here,” she said about arriving at the point of high school graduation. “I thought it would be going on forever and would never get to that point. It seems kind of surreal.”
Johnson now looks forward to being in a greater mix of people that she expects to find at the U of M compared to her Zimmerman environs.