2024 Student Spotlight: Mia Zutter

Mia Zutter and her guide dog

Before her 2023 trip to Bali, Indonesia to earn her yoga teacher certification, 2024 Council Scholarship recipient Mia Zutter dedicated her life to being the best at everything she took on. After losing her vision at age 12, she felt she had to be the best so that she wouldn’t be seen as just “the one with vision loss.” While she did achieve great things, like membership on the U.S. Paralympic Nordic Skiing Team and graduating cum laude from the College of St. Scholastica, her high-achievement mindset had taken a mental toll.

But Mia says she learned more than just how to teach yoga during the one-month course in Bali. Over the rigorous and emotionally draining month, she learned to define herself not by what she’d achieved but by who she was as a person. Today, Mia hopes to pass that mindset on to the next generation as she pursues her Master’s degree in Visual Disabilities at Northern Illinois University with the goal of becoming a teacher of the visually impaired (TVI).

After returning to the U.S., Mia found another source of self-pride: public speaking. Last January, she gave a speech before the Lions Clubs International District 5M-10 Midwinter Convention on her process of getting a guide dog and on independent travel as a person with vision loss. “Public speaking was, and continues to be, something that empowers me as a young woman with vision loss and acted as a catalyst for me to imagine a life advocating for the blind and low vision community,” Mia says.

Mia graduated from The College of St. Scholastica in 2021, but she hadn’t thought of becoming a TVI until after working at a children’s nature camp through AmeriCorps later that summer. Still, she felt some trepidation about working with students who are blind or low vision. “Since my diagnosis, I have burdened myself with a heavy obligation to show others I could overcome vision loss and still be a high achieving, successful woman,” Mia says. “I wasted a lot of time worrying about how having vision loss and being a TVI would appear to others rather than listening to my own passions and what kind of work I feel called to and energized by.”

As she works toward graduating later this fall, Mia has even found a way to apply what she learned in Bali in the classroom, and is researching the benefits of yoga and meditation for people who are blind or low vision. She says she used to experience a significant amount of pain from her vision loss, such as eye strain and back pain from hunching over a desk to read a paper. But with yoga, she was able to mitigate that pain and hopes to share what she’s learned with others who deal with similar pains. Mia says the Council scholarship she received will mostly go to “boring everyday expenses” like rent, though some will go into the “peanut butter fund” for her guide dog Jasmine to reward her for her hard work.

The Council has been awarding scholarships to postsecondary students who are blind or low vision for decades. Applications for 2025 Council Scholarships will be available January 31, with a submission deadline of March 21. You can find more information about our scholarship program at WCBlind.org/Events/Scholarships.

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