Leaving Sheridan for 'The Farm'
A Sheridan High School senior, Scott was sitting in Kim Butt’s English classroom when she learned she had been accepted to the iconic academic institution, located in Palo Alto, California.
“It was 4 in the afternoon,” Scott said. “I went online. I was so stressed out.”
Then it was celebration time when Scott received her official notification.
“I was jumping up and down,” Scott said. “I was hyperventilating. I was so happy.”
For good reason, too, as Stanford’s admission numbers speak for themselves.
Last fall, 22,831 men and 19,666 women applied for admission, according to the university’s website. Only 1,073 men, or 4.7 percent, and 1,067 women, or 5.4 percent, were admitted.
The class of 2017 will graduate next spring.
Stanford offered admission to 2,210 students in March 2013. At 5.7 percent, it was the lowest admit rate in the university’s history at the time.
The school received a then-record 38,828 applications that year, up 6 percent from the previous year.
Scott was born in McMinnville and raised in Sheridan The only child of Walter and Jane Scott, Andea attended K-8 Faulconer-Chapman School before moving to the high school.
Marti Hofenbredl, special programs director for the Sheridan School District, remembers her well. She was a kindergarten teacher when members of this year’s senior class were getting started at Faulconer-Chapman.
“She was driven when she was in kindergarten,” Hofenbredl recalled. “When she was in the seventh and eighth grade, we had to make sure she had access to the high school.”
Eager to learn, Scott taught herself algebra as a seventh grader.
Hofenbredl said Scott has so many good qualities, both as a student and as an individual, and they extend beyond her love for academics to athletics and music.
She said it’s been exciting to watch Scott develop and grow in the Sheridan school system.
Even before stepping inside Faulconer-Chapman for her first day of kindergarten, Scott believes the foundation for a strong academic base had been established at Sheridan’s ABC Daycare-Preschool.
It’s where she first started reading, and she said she owes a lot of her subsequent academic success to the staff there.
“I’ve just been driven all these years,” she said. “I never gave up.”
A few days after she graduates from high school this spring, she’ll receive her associate degree from Chemeketa Community College, where she’s taken courses in biology, geometry, history, philosophy, physics, picking up calculus along the way.
Scott said it has yet to be determined if any of her Chemeketa classes will be transferable to Stanford. However, she’s confident some she has taken, in addition to Advanced Placement classes completed at Sheridan High, will give her “advanced standing” when she enrolls.
Nothing Scott has achieved academically has come as a surprise to Sheridan High Principal Dean Rech.
“She has a tremendous work ethic, along with integrity,” he said. “She’s goal-driven.
“She’s chasing and pursuing her dream. Being able to to go Stanford is just amazing.”
Rech takes great pride in knowing a Sheridan High student is moving on to such an outstanding academic university. He’s gone so far as to give Superintendent Steve Sugg and the school board the good news at recent meetings.
Scott is doing what Rech encourages all students to do.
“Go after your dreams and put forth your best effort,” Rech said. “That’s what she has done.”
Scott also applied to the University of California at Berkeley, but pulled her application when she learned she had been accepted at Stanford.
She plans to major in environmental engineering. Her interest in the field dates to some exposure to robotics in the fifth and sixth grades.
“I want to make a difference,” she said.
While Scott has visited Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and Harvard University and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she’s never set foot on the picturesque and sprawling Stanford campus.
She said she didn’t want to get her hopes up too high before learning she had been accepted. Now that she has, she and her parents will attend Admit Weekend in late April.
“It’s a big celebration,” said Scott, who will have an opportunity to meet current students and speak with professors.
Her packet of admission material included financial information. It will cost her about $65,000 a year to cover room, board, tuition and other expenses.
Scott will receive $53,600 a year in scholarship money from the university, which had a $22.2 billion endowment as of Aug. 31, 2015, according to its website.
Scott’s parents will be responsible for about $6,800 a year, leaving her with about $5,000 a year to make up. The university will help with that by providing her with a work-study job paying $2,800 a year.
She admits it will feel a “little different” moving from a town the size of Sheridan to the San Francisco Bay Area, and stepping onto a campus with more than 16,500 students on more than 8,000 acres.
As Scott already knows, “It’s called The Farm,” and for good reason.
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