Editor’s note: This is the eleventh in a series of feature stories celebrating the Class of 2026 valedictorians and salutatorians at the five high schools in Shelby County.
MORRISTOWN – Mia Garthwaite is goal oriented and process driven.
Years ago, the Morristown High School Class of 2026 Valedictorian told some of the smartest boys in the school they had little chance of knocking her off the “top student” honor. Her competitive nature took over from there.
Now Garthwaite is chasing her dream of being a dentist. She will major in Biology at Indiana University Indianapolis this fall and start the pre-dental track. She also will minor in Business in preparation for one day owning her own dental office.
“(IU) has the only dental school in Indiana,” said Garthwaite, the daughter of Grant and Amy Garthwaite. “The IU School of Dentistry is the only one in Indiana. It is one of the top dental schools. They have the best track to dentistry.
“If this is where I want my heart to be, then this is where I am going to be at for my eight years.”
If everything goes as planned, Garthwaite will return home to open an office.
“I definitely want to come back here with my business,” she said. “I want to come back to Shelby County and the community. It’s a place I love and I want to be a part of it.”
While many valedictorians and salutatorians find giving a graduation speech daunting, Garthwaite wrote the bulk of hers a year earlier.
“The summer before my senior year, I took a speech class online. As a final thing, I had to make some sort of commencement speech,” explained Garthwaite. “So, I literally wrote the speech a year before. I kind of tweaked it a little bit for graduation. It was really easy. I never had to stress about it too much.”
Garthwaite even handled the speech in front of her peers and their families with ease.
“I feel like throughout all of our lives, I was singing in church or being in kid's choirs, I’ve always been on stage, always been an outgoing personality. I like to talk to people,” she said. “And for literally every club I did, I was always giving presentations in front of people or a speech. I was still nervous and a little shaky in my voice.”
Being a dentist was never really Garthwaite’s dream as a child. She has first responders in her family but never saw that as a career option for her.
“I wanted to be in healthcare and help people, but I am not for being an EMT or firefighter,” she said. “So, I started researching medical careers. Dentistry sounded cool, and it’s medical.
“I went to IU Dental Day at the IU School of Dentistry and explored a lot there. Then I did an internship at Morristown Family Dentistry for a year. That’s when I knew this is where I want to be and what I want to do.”
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