Surprise student is excelling early

Orginially published on Surprise Independent - June 4th, 2024

Surprise student Robyn Hoyt is getting a head start on her career by graduating early though Arizona Virtual Academy.

"It was a tremendous experience."

ROBYN HOYT | SURPRISE STUDENT

One Maricopa County high school student's early interest in linguistics and coding has paved the way for a promising career - one she's getting a jump on through early graduation from Arizona Virtual Academy.

Robyn Hoyt, 17, was among the student speakers at the May 24 ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Phoenix. But she is saving her Mandarin Chinese, which she's studied since the fourth grade, for her future cybersecurity career, bolstered by a degree in information technology and engineering she'll pursue at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

Her 3.8 GPA has earned her a Lumberjack Scholars Award, the university's top scholarship for Arizona residents. A member of the Grand Canyon Chapter of the National Honor Society at AZVA, she's also been asked to apply to the NAU Honors College, where she would live with other high-achieving college freshmen.

"I'm excited," Hoyt said about a week before receiving her AZVA diploma. "I'm happy that I get to end my high school journey on a good note. I learned a lot … There were times when I was not sure how things were going to go, but I am glad it went the way it did. And it was a tremendous learning experience."

Hoyt, who just moved with her mother, Theresa, to Surprise from Buckeye, would be among the youngest NAU students. But she's used to working ahead. At AZVA since the ninth grade, she took advantage of the tuition-free, online K-12 public school's flexibility to forge a personalized learning path with a class schedule and curriculum that allowed her to attend school year-round.

"There were opportunities with the online space schedule, that if the student wanted to advance, they could continue to take class during the summer," Theresa said. "So Robyn got ahead by taking more classes during the summer, which allowed her to accumulate credits at a faster pace versus when students get out of [a traditional] school for the year, they're done."

Getting ahead allowed Robyn the time to take college-level Mandarin Chinese courses at Rio Salado College of Tempe. Those courses built on her early grade-school work to learn the language, which she thinks will come in handy for her other major interest, cybersecurity. Robyn began coding in the sixth grade, writing programs to operate simple machines.

"I made numerous coding projects," she said. "I coded machines to do things. I coded a music box to play music every time it opened. I did numerous things."

At AZVA, Hoyt took her studies to a higher level, enrolling in the school's Engineering and Network Security career pathways, according to Erica Young-Jackson, AZVA's Career and College Prep CRE administrator.

"Robyn engaged in opportunities to explore the design process, applying math, science and engineering standards to hands-on projects, programming, basics of computer networking, basics of web technology and computer hardware," Young-Jackson said. "She worked both individually and in teams to design solutions to a variety of problems using 3D modeling software and manage the implementation and maintenance of security devices.

"I am excited to see her continuous development of career skills with NAU."

At NAU, she'll begin assembling the workforce skills required to keep more complex computer systems safe from hackers and other bad actors. It's a profession in high demand in Arizona, which has about 12,000 job openings in cybersecurity, according to the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation.

Hoyt credits AZVA, its flexibility and its teachers, for providing an enriching high school experience that, while nontraditional, positioned her for post-secondary success.

"I'm happy," she said. "Everyone was helpful: my teachers and everyone who was with me in the process. It was a tremendous experience. It was great."

Her mother said she was "empowered" by the AZVA experience.

"The way the world is going with computerization, I felt that it helped her more with the ability to navigate," Theresa said. "So to me, I feel great about it."

To learn more about Arizona Virtual Academy please visit, https://azva.k12.com/.

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