By Andy Diffenderfer
Correspondent
Armed with dozens of college credits already, Ridgeland High School valedictorian Katie Sickler is eager to see where her future takes her as she heads to the Georgia Institute of Technology in August.
Eyeing a double-major in math and physics, Miss Sickler recently graduated from Ridgeland with 67 college credits, enough to qualify her as a junior when she gets to Georgia Tech.
The Ringgold, Ga., resident has spent all of the last two years at Dalton State College, taking classes such as calculus-based physics, calculus II and III and differential equations, among many others.
“My mom is a math teacher and my dad is an engineer, so I guess it’s just genetics,” said Miss Sickler, who will turn 19 in November.
She said there was a lot to like about Georgia Tech, the only school to which she applied. Aside from her ambitious academic plans, which include undergraduate research, she wants to participate in activities as diverse as a robot-building club, concert band and the College Bowl, all of which are at the school.
“I was dead-set on Tech,” she said. “I love the campus. It may be inside Atlanta, but it doesn’t feel like it. Even if I didn’t live in Georgia, I would have wanted to go there. It’s one of the top three engineering schools in the country.”
Miss Sickler was recognized in February as the Walker County Schools Student-Teacher Achievement Recognition, or STAR, student, and she chose world history instructor Ryan Bandy as her STAR teacher. She achieved a perfect score on the reading portion of the SAT and a 750 out of 800 on the math portion.
“I’ve had a lot of kids over the last 10 years, but Katie is not only extremely intelligent, she has a work ethic that is unbelievable,” Mr. Bandy said.
Miss Sickler’s mother, Mary Sickler, a teacher at Ridgeland High’s Honors Academy, said the school let her daughter progress academically at her own lightning-fast pace.
“I knew there were teachers that took a strong interest in gifted students,” Mrs. Sickler said.
Miss Sickler’s father Warren works at Shaw Industries in Dalton, Ga.
She said her biggest initial adjustments at Dalton State came with getting only three grades in a class, instead of a continuous flow of marks for quizzes and homework.
But she liked the structure and discipline evident in college classrooms and found professors determined to challenge their students and go in-depth about subject matter, she said.
“As soon as class starts, we learn from the start to the end,” she said. “I enjoyed the freedom, and it helped me prepare for later in life. It was a good transition.”
She is keeping her future paths open, whether they include work on a doctorate or perhaps a career or research in math, physics or engineering.
In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, computer programming, playing the saxophone and keeping herself informed through the Wall Street Journal and science magazines.
According to Mr. Bandy, Katie’s voracious appetite for knowledge means the sky is the limit for her future at Georgia Tech and beyond.
“She’s a once-in-a-lifetime student, and I found that out within one or two days of meeting her,” he said.
Andy Diffenderfer is based in LaFayette, Ga. Contact him at andydiff97@comcast.net.
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