“I thought it would help me make friends,” the Fairfield High School senior said, poking fun of her childhood memory. “They just looked at me funny and ran the other way.”
Undaunted, she kept at it, eventually becoming the first in her class to read in German.
“I just started talking to people, and it kind of worked out,” she said.
Nina, 18, is one of Fairfield’s 2010 valedictorians. She was born in Bosnia, four months before war broke out. Her father, an official in the president’s secret service detail, stayed behind while Nina and her mother fled to Germany. Later, grenade shrapnel struck his head and he was flown to Germany for surgery, which included installing a metal plate in his head. He remained in Germany, working for the Bosnian embassy until nine years later the family was forced to move again.
Faced with returning to a country with high unemployment and poverty or a chance for their daughter to receive an education in the United States, Nina said her parents, Edin and Diana Kosaric, chose to leave behind their family in Bosnia, placing their focus on her future.
“They figured if I finished any kind of college here, I’d be better off,” she said.
Once again, Nina said she had to learn a new language. At 9 years old, she was placed in a special program at Lakota Local Schools for children who did not speak English.
On the first day of school, the only item on the menu she understood was ice cream. So, when the cafeteria worker scooped a white substance with sauce on top onto her tray, Nina thought it must be ice cream. Disappointment set in when she took a large bite of mashed potatoes.
“I thought what kind of a place is this? Why do they scoop stuff with ice cream scoops?”
Frustrated with the language barrier, Nina spent the summer watching television to teach herself English.
“I would turn on the closed caption and figured it out,” she said. “I seriously don’t know how. All I know is that one day I was speaking English.”
Before school began, her family moved to Fairfield where her uncle lived, and she enrolled in third-grade at Central Elementary School.
“I guess I just kind of fit in,” she said. “That’s been my defining thing — that I’m from Bosnia.”
Nina spent the past three summers visiting family in Bosnia, and the experience, she said, helped her discover her roots.
“I used to associate myself more with Germany,” she said. “Since I visited Bosnia, in some of the people that live there, I can see where I get my characteristics from.”
Nina’s father, who has an engineering degree, is in charge of security for 5/3 banks. Her mother, who has a law degree that isn’t recognized in the Unite States, works at Saks Fifth Avenue.
“They sacrificed their degrees they earned so I could go to college here,” Nina said. “They’ve always expected me to get A’s.”
Nina said she was grounded if she didn’t do her best in a class.
“They always knew I could do it. That’s always made me work harder, because they’ve given up so much for me.”
Nina will be attending Harvard University, her life-long dream school, in the fall to major in biology and pre-medicine with a possibly emphasis on research.
“The day I got in, we all cried,” she said. “This is my life dream come true. I feel like I’ve justified my parent’s decision to come here.”
English teacher Corey Simmins said Nina is typical of many great historical figures, with her inventive, creative and dynamic personality. The teen Spanish and Latin, was a member of National Honor Society and Interact Club, volunteered in the community and worked at Walgreens pharmacy to pay for her car.
“She is a magnanimous person,” he said. “Magnanimous people just take it and go with it. I never saw her get frustrated. She’s very affable. She takes all different people from all different walks of life and all different stripes and never has an unkind word for anyone.”
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