Jennifer Cisneros, a 10th-grader at Birmingham Community Charter High School with a 4.2 GPA, said she "never really thought about" applying right away to her dream universities, USC and UCLA. She planned to go to community college first because she felt it would be easier to adjust to the rigors of college courses.
But this semester she enrolled in a college-level computer science course taught by Stanford professor Patrick Young — and her plans are changing.
"In the beginning, I was really struggling," she said. "I was going to drop the class," which involved more independent study than she was used to. But her high school teacher, Lindsay Humphrey, encouraged her to stay.
