Indiana’s Miss Raven Osborne is not your average 18-year-old. The astute high schooler is scheduled to graduate with the rest of her classmates on May 22. But before hitting that milestone, she will first graduate from college on May 5, which is Friday. That’s right: Osborne is graduating from college before high school.
“Yeah, they think I’m lying,” Osborne told CBS News.
She accomplished the daunting task through online classes, year-round community college and two years at Purdue University Northwest. Her semester-long college courses counted as a full year of high school credit.
“Sophomore, that was the most work. I had five high school classes, four college classes,” she recalled.
According to USA Today, she will earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology with a minor in early-childhood education from Purdue.
Osborne is currently a senior at the 895-student 21st Century Charter School in Gary and apparently wasn’t thought to be the brightest student. She told the Northwest Indiana Post-Tribune in 2016 that there were times when she wanted to quit, but her mother constantly encouraged her and told her she could do it.
“When I was younger, I was labeled with a learning disability,” Osborne said. “My mother always told me I could do whatever I wanted to do in life.”
“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 Northwest Indiana Times.
It seems that juggling both a high school and a college workload didn’t slow down Osborne’s other ambitions, either.
According to USA Today, she also had a job at one point.
“I was working a midnight shift at a day care center. I just had to watch the children while they were sleeping, then feed them breakfast when they woke up. It was a day care for parents who worked a night shift. It just got to be too stressful, and I had to resign,” she told the Times.
However, all of Osborne’s hard work has paid off, because this fall she will be back at 21st Century Charter, not as a student, but as a teacher with a $38,000 annual salary.