![\"Shriya](\"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/magazine\/files\/2020\/04\/utc-mag-purohit-1200.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The day before Valentine\u2019s Day, four friends sit around a table in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga\u2019s Guerry Center, decorating paper hearts.<\/p>\n
\u201cOoooh,\u201d says Emily Hemingway when she sees neon-pink, green, yellow and orange markers in front of her. Sydney Ellis and Jesse Hayes examine a sheet of paper listing Latin words and their meanings in English. Carissime: Dearest. Paulo corde: Little heart. They copy the Latin words onto paper hearts<\/p>\n
Shriya Purohit quietly draws a heart within a heart within a heart, alternating pink and yellow markers. Just a group of college students enjoying each other\u2019s company between bouts of studying for Honors College classes. One sophomore and three freshmen.<\/p>\n
One of whom is a freshman student at 15.<\/p>\n
Shriya.<\/p>\n
When she tells people at UTC that she\u2019s 15 years old, a Brock Scholar and a freshman in business analytics, she says usually gets one of two reactions. \u201cSome people are: \u2018Oh, that\u2019s cool. Great for you,\u2019 and other people are like \u2018Whaaat!!?\u2019\u201d she says with a laugh.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought, \u2018Wow!\u2019\u201d Hayes says. \u201cI have a 15-year-old sister who is not able to be in the Honors College.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe didn\u2019t act like I assumed a 15-year-old would act like, and she didn\u2019t gloat about the fact that she\u2019s a 15-year-old in the Honors College,\u201d Ellis says.<\/p>\n
That she was homeschooled and graduated from high school at age 14 also draws a mixture of admiration and disbelief, Shriya says, but it\u2019s all good. \u201cPeople are really supportive. I didn\u2019t expect it to be bad, but I didn\u2019t expect people to be so understanding, just nice and making me feel welcomed,\u201d says Shriya, whose coffee skin and long, jet-black hair are visible signs of her Indian heritage.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou kind of feel nervous coming in at my age and wondering how people will act. I thought it would be really hard for me to adapt to such a new thing, but it wasn\u2019t hard at all. It\u2019s been surprisingly smooth, the transition.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reaction from students and faculty wasn\u2019t her primary concern before she arrived from her home in Florida. Hers was more functional: Would college be too much for her, academically? She thought: Will I be able to do it? So far, so good. Majoring in business analytics is working out, although she\u2019s added a computer science minor \u201cas kind of a backup.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shriya is a student in Joseph Jordan\u2019s Introduction to the Humanities class, and the assistant professor of English says her age \u201cis not something I even think about anymore.\u201d Jordan\u2019s students read classics by Homer, Plato, Anton Chekhov, Shakespeare and others, that \u201care challenging for adults,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is a very intensive class; they have to turn in a lot of essays. Shriya is always the person who has her essay completed in advance, who asks me to talk about it in advance. The quality of her thinking is just incredibly wise,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
Classmate Emily Hemingway says she and Shriya discussed some of the books being read in English 1010 and Hemingway thought, \u201cOh my gosh, she\u2019s so much smarter than me.\u201d<\/p>\n
In her free time, Shriya enjoys golfing with her father, a private equity investor, but she does that just for fun and says she has no intention of joining the UTC women\u2019s golf team. In between her college studies, she\u2019s also squeezing in time to learn to play the sitar and harmonium, traditional musical instruments from her family\u2019s home country of India.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really cool to be connected to my culture,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n One of the main reasons I chose UTC was because of its close proximity to my home in Chattanooga. Because of my age, my parents and I weren’t comfortable with me staying in a dorm. Another factor was having the opportunity to apply (and be accepted) to the Honors College. Knowing that, as an honors student, I would have a community to support me really persuaded me to choose UTC. The beautiful campus is also a perfect size; it’s not too big or small and, overall, everything just went into place!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shriya Purohit is a 15-year old student at UTC.\n","protected":false},"author":1105,"featured_media":489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,101004],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-260","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-honors","8":"category-spring-2020-edition","9":"cs-entry","10":"cs-video-wrap"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"Shriya](\"https:\/\/blogarchive.utc.edu\/magazine\/files\/2020\/04\/utc-mag-purohit2-1200-150x150.jpg\")
Why did you choose UTC?<\/h4>\n