Hill student wins Greater Pottstown Foundation’s 2024 Shandy Hill Essay contest

POTTSTOWN — The Greater Pottstown Foundation’s 2024 Shandy Hill Essay winner is Diemmy Dang from the Hill School.

She was born in Reading and grew up in Phoenixville, attended Wyndcroft School and then the Hill School making her a Pottstownian by adoption.

Her parents both emigrated from Vietnam after the war, working hard at establishing themselves and bearing the brunt of hard work so that Diemmy and her brother received good educations and had lives more privileged than their own.

Her father is overseas working for the country that took him in. Diemmy acknowledges that despite attending Wyndcroft, Hill School is academically competitive and she still had to work very hard. She notes that despite being a minority, her Pottstown experience was free of prejudice.

She has indeed been very fortunate and is deeply grateful to have had the privileges that her parents struggled to provide her.

According to a release from the Greater Pottstown Foundation, Diemmy has a natural talent for writing, “her essay was intriguing, well written and most importantly touching. Her essay struck a chord with all the board members of the Greater Pottstown Foundation. She touched on the inner truth of our community when she concluded her essay:

“Look closer, however, and find that industry and money are never the things that make a city. Instead, it is the people — relentless and tough but caring and tenderhearted all at the same time. Pottstown is built on these kinds of people, the ones who are determined to make it so that, in the clearing of the steel mills’ rusty smoke, a stronger city lies in wait underneath. These are the people who make Pottstown both a community and a home, both a place for pursuing dreams and a place for achieving them. To me, Pottstown is its people, and there is nothing more special than that.”

“Her essay was human, honest, caring and compassionate and not a cookie-cutter attempt to fit a mold,” the release stated. “This essay was not a lament about drugs, or crime, but rather a sincere evaluation of our community by a minority student who struggled to succeed and fit in, just like the struggles of the Pottstown she saw from a unique perspective, offering a valuable insight into who and what we really are as a community.”

Diemmy graduates this year and is off to the University of Pennsylvania. She has not yet decided what her major will be at Penn but hopes that whatever she chooses it will help her make a significant impact.

She will get help making that impact with the $30,000 scholarship that comes with winning the Shandy Hill Essay Contest.

The GPF does not want her to pay it back.

“We want her to pay it forward for the benefit of all,” the foundation stated. “We are certain that Diemmy’s future will be bright and whatever she decides to do, her impact will be great.”