In the Jubilee Year of Hope in the Catholic Church, Hope Dickson – a senior at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, D.C. – was recently named as one of 10 Catholic school students across the country to receive the 2025 Youth Virtues, Valor and Vision Award from the National Catholic Educational Association.
At Georgetown Visitation, Dickson is an aspiring engineer who leads STEM activities with students at the school, and she also helps lead Visi4Life, the pro-life club there. She has also volunteered with teens serving at the Catholic Diocese of Arlington’s WorkCamp, and this past summer she had an internship with NASA.
“Her Catholic faith drives her service and advocacy,” the NCEA press release announcing the winners said about Dickson. That statement also noted, “Hope’s unwavering commitment to faith, service and advocacy inspires those around her, as she strives to make a lasting impact on her community and the world.”
In that statement about the student award winners, NCEA president and CEO Dr. Stevent said the Catholic school sixth through 12th graders receiving the Youth Virtues, Valor and Vision Award “have shown us what it means to serve with love, humility and joy. In their Christ-centered service to others, they inspire us all to deepen our own commitment to faith and action.”
The student recipients of the award will receive Chromebooks donated by Archangel Education + Technology, a corporate partner of the NCEA that provides classroom technology for K-12 schools across the United States.
Kati Hylden Krueger, the director of the St. Jane de Chantal Salesian Center at Georgetown Visitation and a graduate in the school’s 1999 bicentennial class, served as the math department chair there when Dickson as a freshman asked to learn Algebra II material over the summer so she could take Honors PreCalculus as a sophomore.
“She quickly rose to be one of the strongest students in the classroom, always excited when we learned something new,” said Krueger, who added, “Hope’s excellence in the classroom is top-notch, but she manages to surpass that with her generosity of spirit to other people… Christ’s light shines in her smile and in her words and actions.”
Hope Dickson, who turns 18 on Feb. 8, attends Blessed Sacrament Parish in Alexandria, Virginia, with her parents, Christine and Gary Dickson. She is a lector at her parish and was an altar server there. Dickson is a graduate of St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, and for the past two summers she volunteered with the Diocese of Arlington’s WorkCamp, which its website describes as “a week-long experience providing teens with an opportunity to encounter Christ through service, faith, and fellowship.”
In her first summer at the WorkCamp, Dickson worked with fellow teens on an old house, helping to do general repairs, including sanding down and repainting the exterior and replacing windows. She said that the family that owned the house was able to buy a car with the money they saved from the donated home repairs.
This past summer at the camp, she helped build a wheelchair ramp for a home, to help a family member there who was about to have surgery.
“I want to be an engineer,” Dickson said in an interview. That volunteer work, she said, “was really meaningful to me, to use math and construction skills in my service to others, combining my two passions.”
The high school senior does not yet know where she will go to college, but she is interested in studying aerospace engineering, and someday working for NASA or a firm like Boeing or SpaceX. “I want to build rockets or rovers or satellites,” she said.
At Georgetown Visitation, Dickson is a leader with Cubs Who Code, a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) club that now has more than 20 members at the school.
“Coding has always been something I’m interested in,” she said, explaining that coding in its most basic meaning involves typing instructions for a computer. Dickson teaches fellow students to code, and the group sponsors speaker events for female professionals in coding and engineering to talk about their careers.
This fall, she worked with Krueger to build a chatbot for the website of the St. Jane de Chantal Salesian Center that uses artificial intelligence to provide prayers or spiritual guidance based on the writings of the founders of the Order of the Visitation, St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal. Georgetown Visitation was founded in 1799 as the first Catholic girls’ school in the new United States of America, and it continues to be sponsored by that religious community. The St. Jane de Chantal Salesian Center on the school’s campus shares the Visitation Sisters’ spirituality with students, graduates, families and community members.
For the chatbot, Dickson inputted sources including the Treatise on the Love of God and the Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales and letters from both St. Francis and St. Jane de Chantal. The chatbot can answer spiritual questions using phrases from those writings.
On a related article on the school’s website, Dickson said, “I think the chatbot bridges the gap between religion and a younger generation. You can talk to it like a human. It can give you spiritual advice and prayers for whatever you are dealing with.”
Dickson also participates in the BEDA (Building, Engineering, Design & Architecture) club at Georgetown Visitation that won a first prize for designing an Olympic Stadium to replace RFK Stadium in a competition sponsored by the D.C. branch of the Architecture, Construction & Engineering (ACE) Mentor Program. She did a lot of the math for that project. In addition, she competes in math competitions as part of the Mathletes, another STEM club at Visitation.
As a third grader at St. Thomas More Cathedral School, Dickson helped build a small satellite called a CubeSat, and she got to go to Cape Canaveral for its launch.
“That sparked my interest in aerospace engineering,” she said.
This past summer, Dickson was selected for a NASA SEES (STEM Enhancement in Earth Science) internship at the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas at Austin, where she used her math skills to help build three drones to collect data. The technology of being able to locate a drone, she said, can be useful in the future for search and rescue missions, medical deliveries and explorations of other planets.
“That was an experience where I saw how my passion for math and engineering can effect real change in people’s lives,” she said.
That summer, she also took part in Virginia Aerospace Science and Technology Scholars program, which is also sponsored by NASA. In an article on the Visitation website, Dickson described that as “a Model UN for space nerds” planning a mission to Mars.
From middle school through all four years at Georgetown Visitation, Dickson has participated in the March for Life in Washington, and she is the co-president of the school’s pro-life group, Visi4Life.
“I think it’s really important that our country protect the most vulnerable,” she said.
In addition to joining the March for Life, Dickson and members of Visi4Life also volunteer at women’s shelters, organize diaper drives, and lead prayer services to advocate for life.
“We cover the full spectrum,” Dickson said. “A lot of people mischaracterize the pro-life movement as ‘just get the baby born and be done with it,’ but part of our mission is to protect life at every stage, because all life has value, not just the unborn.”
Reflecting on her experience at Georgetown Visitation, Dickson said the confidence and advocacy skills she built at that all-girls’ school helped her during her NASA internship.
Being a part of her school community, she said, “has opened my eyes to the religious and political diversity that we see in the world… and you know even if you disagree (about something), we’ll still be friends,” she said.
