While most students take four years to graduate and get all of their credits in high school, senior Zoe Hansen took advantage of her resources and decided to graduate as fast as possible.

For her, this was nearly a year earlier than her peers. Hansen’s long term goal is attending medical school and basically being in a university setting for the next 10-12 years.

“I wanted to graduate early because I want to go to med school,” said Hansen. “With that I am already going to be in college until I am 30 so I thought I would speed it up a little bit.” 

It takes hard work and dedication to graduate on time, yet alone graduating an entire year early. Hansen has known for several years that graduating early was an easily obtainable goal.

“It’s not really weird for me graduating early, it’s more weird when other people hear that I am graduating early, because it’s like woah I’m 16 and graduating,” Hansen said.

Growing up we were always asked what we wanted to be, and for most people they had four years to fully decide, but for Hansen, she had a make a much quicker decision early on about how long she was going to be at Maize South.

“I have been planning this since 7th grade, because I want to become a surgeon in the future,” said Hansen. “I want to go to Washington for college and go to med school there.”

Ultimately, her experiences within a high school may be cut a little short, but Hansen is ready to experience the world after high school in full force.

“I still think it was a good decision but I kinda regret it, because summer classes are not fun and I still have to take online classes with the normal high school work load, that I would’ve taken even if I was going for four years,” said Hansen.