Pillow Academy senior Dia Chawla has been selected as a state winner in this year’s Heisman High School Scholarship competition, which honors scholar-athletes.
Dia Chawla
“We are very excited,” said Gearldine DeLoach, a high school counselor at Pillow. “We think she has a good chance of winning the national, which will be announced later this month.”
DeLoach said Chawla not only has a string of academic honors but has succeeded as an athlete. “She has won two state championships in dance, two in tennis and she was on the Overall basketball championship team,” DeLoach said.
In recent months, Chawla learned that she earned a perfect score of 36 on the ACT college entrance exam and also that she is a semi-finalist for a National Merit scholarship award. She is the 18-year-old daughter of Gauri and Suresh Chawla of Greenwood. The Heisman award, sponsored by Acceptance Insurance, was announced Tuesday. “We are just stunned,” her father, Suresh, said.
DeLoach also spoke about Chawla’s community service. Aside from conducting ACT preparation classes on Sunday afternoons for students from Pillow and Greenwood High School, she has provided more than 100 hours of volunteer service at Greenwood Leflore Hospital and assisted the Boys and Girls Club in delivering school materials to students studying at home during pandemic-related public school campus shutdowns..
In the last four years, two other Pillow students have won $1,000 Heisman state scholarships. They are Caroline Brock of Greenwood and Dia’s brother, Sunjay, who also won the national competition.
The annual statewide award is given to one male and one female student in Mississippi. Ward Adams of Lamar School in Meridian is this year’s male winner.
