Corinne Weeks dropped out of high school.
She's 17.
And in a few weeks, she's graduating college.
This Ohio native's next chapter is even more surprising.
She now has to choose between nine Ph.D. programs for chemical engineering at elite universities, including Ivy Leagues.
Oh, and each of those schools offered her a full scholarship, plus a housing stipend — worth more than $2.3 million in total for four years.
Corinne attended Milford High School until her sophomore year at age 14. She had good friends and was playing on the water polo team, but her classes weren’t challenging enough.
So, she left Ohio and enrolled in the Program for the Exceptionally Gifted at Mary Baldwin University in Virginia.
“I felt like it was the place I was meant to be,” Corinne said. “I could start on my college degree right away and take all the classes I wanted to.”
She’ll be graduating in May with a 4.0 GPA after three years at the women’s college at MBU.
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Stanford, Princeton, University of Texas and Cornell are on her list of suitors. Michigan State, Case Western Reserve, University of Virginia and University of Illinois are also in the running.
Many of those programs are among the top 10 chemical engineering programs in the country.
She says she’s leaning towards Stanford and plans to make her decision by mid-April.
Corinne’s brilliant math mind has already taken her far beyond a typical high school experience.
Instead of loading up on AP classes, she’s doing group projects with 23-year-olds and working closely with professors on collegiate-level research projects in math and chemistry.
Her favorite class was called the history of math, where students learned proofs mathematicians did back in year 0.
Corinne's favorite part of the program? That's the sense of community she felt with the program most, which is made up of about 60 teenage girls
Camille (left) and Corinne (right) Weeks celebrate at an annual ball put on by Mary Baldwin University. (Photo: Provided/Terri Weeks)
Like most teenage girls, they have sleepovers and gossip.But the late-night chats are usually about medical school and Ph.D. programs. And they don’t have to ask their parents’ permission, they just walk down the hall.
Sure, they’ll miss prom and homecoming, but they get dressed up for their own fancy dances like the signature ball.
But she can’t be on the swim team or play water polo for the Milford Eagles. (She sure doesn’t miss the 5:30 a.m. wake up calls for practice before school.)
The Program for the Exceptionally Gifted is part of the women’s college at Mary Baldwin University. Girls as young as 13 can skip all or part of high school and enroll in the program and live and study on campus.
“It’s normal for us,” Corinne said. “I’m surrounded by other people doing ambitious things.”
Corinne enrolled at 15 and is majoring in Applied Mathematics with minors in Chemistry and Physics.
She’s studying the effects of bisphenol S, or BPS, in plastics and looking at wastewater treatment. Her senior thesis is focused on how the diffusion equation is used in chemical engineering.
It’s a heavy workload, Corinne said, but it’s on her own time and she’s not restricted by classroom walls from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Her professor and advisor, John Ong, said he thinks of Corinne as Sherlock Holmes.
“She chips away at a problem,” Ong said. “You don’t see the brilliance until the very end.”
Ong, who has been teaching mathematics at Mary Baldwin for nearly 30 years, described Corinne’s mind as a really sharp tool that cuts deep into a subject.
You can underestimate her because she’s quiet, he said, but her mind works steadily. Then, suddenly, she comes up with a solution.
“It’s unbeatable when you’re talented and hard-working,” Ong said. “And clearly, there is brilliance in her.”
Corinne isn’t the only one in her family with a brilliant mind.
Her 15-year-old sister, Camille, is a freshman at Mary Baldwin.
Sending her teenage daughters 400 miles away wasn’t easy – or cheap – but it was worth it, Terri Weeks said. And there’s Facetime, which helps make the distance feel a bit shorter.
“It was about finding the right educational fit,” Weeks said. “I miss my daughters, but it’s gratifying to be able to see them thriving academically.”
She said Corinne found her place at Mary Baldwin and blossomed in a way that she would not have been able to if she stayed in high school.
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Corinne sees the educational opportunities she gained beyond a traditional high school experience, too, but it's not what she talks about when reflecting on her time at Mary Baldwin.
She doesn't brag about the top 10 chemical engineering programs pursuing her.
Instead, she's proud of being the president of the math club and that she's on the Honor Council in student government.
She also just presented her research on the advanced oxidation processes of bisphenol-S in water at the American Chemical Society national conference, but that isn't the first thing she mentions.
Corinne says what she treasures most are her friends and professors that made this small town in Virginia feel like home.