Schools

Brighton Student Skips Senior Year of High School to Start at Georgia Tech

Brittany Marshall was admitted through the early admissions program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Seventeen-year-old Brittany Marshall won't be graduating with her high school senior class next spring.

Instead, she'll be finishing up her freshman year at the Georgia Institute of Technology after she was selected by the university's early admission program to forgo her last year of high school.

Marshall, a Brighton resident who has attended charter schools since third grade, was one of nine students from across the U.S. that was admitted to the Atlanta-based technology school. Georgia Tech was ranked the seventh best public university in the country by the U.S. News & World Report and the fourth best undergraduate engineering college, which is what Marshall is studying.

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Marshall said she applied to the early admission program on a whim. After she was accepted, she toured Georgia Tech and saw what it had to offer and decided to go for it.

"For me, it would be really cool to go to a tech school, something that's very math and science-based," she said. "But places like MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), they don't have anything like sports or social, they just do academics. But I kind of like the idea of getting a group together to go to a football game, so Georgia Tech has both."

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James Reese, the principal of the Charyl Stockwell secondary school campus in Brighton, said that Marshall's success stems from her intelligence and hard work, but especially the latter. Her mother, Dawn Marshall, said Brittany Marshall has been working hard since she started school at the first grade level when they lived in Great Britain. School starts at an earlier age in Britain, her mother said, so because of Marshall's age she was placed in first grade, where she started out behind her classmates in most areas.

"She was intent on catching up, she worked really hard, and by the end of the year she was the top of her class," Dawn Marshall said. "She definitely is highly intelligent, but she also has the work ethic to make it happen."

After returning to the U.S., Brittany Marshall was enrolled in third grade at the elementary campus of the Charyl Stockwell Academy in Hartland, and has been with the charter school ever since. She said the school's smaller classrooms and attention to students' problems helped her get to where she is now.

In addition to Brittany Marshall's academics, she's taken part in student government, National Honors Society and basketball. When the basketball team started up at the academy, Marshall was given permission to play with the boys as the only girl on the team.

Marshall said she's only nervous about the distance from home, and not so much about her age when she departs for Georgia Tech.

"When they ask you your age, they always just ask if you're a freshman," Marshall said. "I'm just a regular freshman, I'm not in any special program now that I'm in."

Marshall will still miss out on her senior graduation, the first graduating class at Charyl Stockwell since it was founded as just an elementary school 15 years ago. But as the first one out of the gate, Marshall instantly becomes an example for her classmates.

"It really sets the standard here for students who come through our school, to develop a story of students who graduated here and what they do with their future," Reese said. "Certainly Brittany becomes a part of that legacy, the first one out of our school, and she set the bar really high."


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