Grace Bush has already graduated from college.
That may not be fascinating in and of itself, but the 16-year-old has yet to receive her high school diploma. That graduation ceremony will happen this Friday, the Sun Sentinel reports.
The clever teenager attends Florida Atlantic University High School, which has a special program with FAU that allows young students to earn college credit at no cost while in high school.
"I'm excited, but for some reason it feels like it's all coming too soon, too fast," the Hollywood, Fla., teenager says.
At FAU High, students typically earn about three years of college credit, but Grace got a jump start by earning college credits at Broward College at age 13. She accelerated so quickly through FAU's program that she has already completed her four years of college to receive a bachelor's degree in criminal justice and became the youngest member of her graduating class this year.
Grace's prodigious nature apparently runs in the family. Her older sister Gisla graduated from the university at age 18 and is currently pursuing her master's. Another older sister, 17-year-old Gabrielle, is on track to graduate over the summer.
Her mother, who is also named Gisla, home-schooled all nine of her children, a practice that allowed her to accelerate their learning pace. However, she says Grace was special even among her siblings. "She was very accelerated. She started reading at 2, and she could perform as well as her older sister, who was three years her senior," her mother tells the Sentinel.
The Bushes pushed their children to do college courses within high school because they knew that they could not afford to send all of them to college.
Grace has juggled a full load of classes every semester since she was 14, even in the summer, in addition to playing the flute for the Miami Music Project orchestra and the South Florida Youth Symphony, the Sentinel reports. She calls her music her "stress reliever."
Her packed schedule resulted in her coming home from music obligations at around 10 each night, and then she'd stay up until 2 a.m. to study. She'd sometimes nap on the commute to FAU to catch up on her sleep. She passed on school dances, football games, parties and other popular activities.
"I missed out on being a kid, goofing off and wasting time," she tells the paper.
But her hard work and dedication have certainly paid off. Although she wanted a 4.0 GPA, she still managed to graduate with a 3.81.
So the next step is to earn her master's degree at FAU before she trots off to law school, building her way up to her ultimate goal.
"I would like to be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court," Grace confides to the Sentinel.
Read more at the Sun Sentinel.