A Steinbach High School student has won the prestigious Beaverbrook Vimy Prize which includes a fully funded trip to historical World War One and Two sites in Europe.

Cassidy Choquette, who will be going into grade 12 at the SRSS this coming fall, was one of only 16 students from across Canada, the United Kingdom, and France to win the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize. She says the two-week trip will take her and the other winners to England, Belgium, and France.

"There are a lot of amazing things that we are going to do. I have always learned about it from documentaries and in history class but being there is going to be an intense experience and I can’t even imagine what I am going to feel when I am there and taking everything in because we go to where these battles happened almost exactly 100 years ago."

The students will attend intimate history lectures at Oxford, pay their respects at the stunning Canadian National Vimy Memorial, learn from experts at Ypres, Passchendaele, and Beaumont Hamel, walk along Juno Beach and other key sites in Normandy, and participate in unique commemoration ceremonies.

Jeremy Diamond is the Executive Director of the Vimy Foundation. He notes the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize is a chance to celebrate young leaders across Canada and provide them with a unique opportunity to learn about Canada’s military history. He notes with no more World War One veterans still around, it is important that their stories stay alive in our young people. He notes Cassidy Choquette is an excellent candidate.

"Cassidy has a great connection to this because of her personal connection to the first world war and to the military as a whole. Her great grandfathers were in the first world war, she has a family member dealing with the challenge of PTSD and that was directly related to the essay question that we had reached out to each of these students and asked them to come up with a top-notch answer, she is also very much involved in her community."

Choquette says her grade 11 history teacher was instrumental in stoking her passion for Canadian history and encouraging her to apply for the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize. She notes it was a long but rewarding journey.

"The application process was an essay, a motivation letter, and then a reflection to war art and then we needed a reference. The essay was the longest part and this year’s topic was PTSD so we had to write about PTSD, different treatments, like 100 years ago compared to now."

The Vimy Foundation gets approximately 200 applications for this prize each year and only 16 students were chosen.