CSAS senior gets QuestBridge scholarship

A senior at the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences is among four local high schoolers who have been awarded full scholarships to prestigious universities through QuestBridge’s 2017 National College Match Scholarship.

Hamilton County Schools on Monday announced that Kedhejah Kelly had been offered early admission to Emory University in Atlanta through the program.

The program pairs high-achieving, low-income students with scholarships to some of the nation’s top colleges, including Amherst, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Stanford and Yale, according to a news release from QuestBridge.

QuestBridge’s process begins in a student’s junior year, when a teacher or school administrator nominates students who qualify financially and academically to the program.

Kelly joins two students from Central High and one from Ooltewah as this year’s recipients from Hamilton County.

Kelly plans to study math on a pre-medicine track and hopes to pursue a career as an anesthesiologist.

Last year, twins from Soddy-Daisy High School were recipients of scholarships through the QuestBridge program. Brittany O’Dell headed to Atlanta this fall to study business and film at Emory University and her sister, Destiny O’Dell, is a Lupton Scholar at Wellesley in Massachusetts majoring in environmental studies.

The teens are four of only 918 students nationwide who were matched through the College Match program.

These students have an average unweighted GPA of 3.92, have scored between 1350 and 1490 on the SAT and between 29 and 33 on the ACT.

QuestBridge also reported that 76 percent of this year’s scholars are the first in their families to attend a four-year college.