Joey Whitmire first began to fall in love with technology when he took a computer foundations class at Soddy Daisy High School.
The timing worked in his favor. His sophomore year, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced his high school would be the home of its second technology academy as part of Hamilton County Schools’ Future Ready initiative, and Whitmire became a member of the institute’s first cohort.
He credits the program for giving him a pipeline for continuing education. After he graduated high school in 2022, Whitmire enrolled in the BlueSky Institute, an accelerated computer science degree program at the BlueCross campus.