High schooler to finish college first
Think your 18-year-old who has just picked their college is some kind of brainiac?
Then consider Indiana’s Raven Osborne.
Osborne, who has been taking college classes part-time, is about to graduate from college — before she gets her high school diploma.
And now she is going to be a teacher at the same high school.
Osborne, a senior at the 895student 21st Century Charter School in Gary, will earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology with a minor in early childhood education from Purdue University Northwest on May 5, then graduate from high school on May 22.
“Yeah, they think I’m lying,” Raven told CBS News. It’s true. According to the Big
Ten Network (BTN), Osborne began taking classes at a local community college as a freshman and soon earned an associate’s degree in general studies. Then, encouraged by her mother, Hazel Osborne, and 21st Century’s president and superintendent, Kevin Teasley, she decided to become the first in the school’s history to earn a bachelor’s degree while still enrolled.
“When I was a younger, I was labeled with a learning disability,” Osborne told the Northwest Indiana Post-Tribune in 2016. Osborne told the Post-Tri
bune it was tough taking both high school and college classes and that there were times when she wanted to quit, but her mother constantly encouraged her.
“My mother always told me I could do whatever I wanted to do in life,” she told the paper.
While at Purdue Northwest, which is in nearby Hammond, Osborne stood out to faculty and staff, BTN reported. “She not only is academically gifted, but has demonstrated amazing intellectual maturity in her pursuit of a baccalaureate degree at Purdue Northwest,” Purdue Northwest spokesman Wes Lukoshus told
The Times of Northwest Indiana.
Osborne has been hired by the school and will be an early interventionist with elementary-age children, earning more than $30,000 a year, the paper reported.
Not a bad paycheck for a recent college graduate and an even better one for a just-graduated high schooler.