When Gabriella Sciuchetti first started to think about going to college, she was just 13 years old. When she was 14, she had her first college class.

The opportunity to go to college came up for Gabriella when she was in middle school. She said one of her school councilors sent the idea along to her parents.

According to Gabriella, there is a special program at the University of Washington called the Robinson Center for Young Scholars. She said it is a program for 16 to 18 middle school students to do a year of prep work for college.

She said she wasn’t even sure she wanted to do it at first.

“You know a lot really went into it when I was first given the option to apply. I actually really didn’t want to because I was afraid to leave all my friends behind, but then it became a ‘Well if you apply there’s nothing to lose.’ Then I think by the time I put all the effort into the application it was kind of a decision I had already made I guess,” she said.

At the Robinson Center, Gabriella said it was an intense curriculum with a lot of writing. She explained that a subject like math is easier to learn and teach because math is just learning new skills, whereas writing and English are harder for people to move up in and to get to that college level of thinking.

She said she also had to complete the SAT and ACT before officially starting college.

After the one year of learning the essentials of college, Gabriella said she felt ready for college. For her first ever college class, she said it felt, well, normal.

”It’s still school, right? It’s still like a lecture and it’s definitely a different format than like being in a small classroom that you’re kind of used to in elementary school and middle school, but I don’t think I was so caught off guard or that it was so different from normal school,” she said.

After some consideration, Gabriella decided to major in aerospace and astrospace engineering.

“I wanted to do engineering and planes and rockets are pretty cool, was basically the rationale behind that on,” she said.

While her age could not stop her from succeeding in her education, it did cause her to hit a road block here and there when it came time to move out of her family’s home in Covington.

“A 16-year-old is not designed to be living on their own. So there’s been problems with, ‘OK, can I go to the doctor without a parent? Can I have a car registered at my address for insurance purposes?’ So there’s been kind of things like that,” Gabriella said.

Looking back at her time at UW, she said her favorite part was getting to do all of the different projects for her degree.

The one thing that she sort of struggled with was making long-term friends. She said the one thing she regrets the most is “not having a college experience.”

”I’m not really coming out of college — I certainly have a few very close friends — But I don’t have kind of a large social network, which is pretty typical for someone in their early 20’s or with a college degree,” she explained.

Even though she said she didn’t really have a college experience, she also said she does not regret missing high school and she is happy with the route she has taken.

Now that she has graduated, Gabriella already has a job lined up for her at a company called Epic Systems, a health software company in Madison, Wisconsin.

There, Gabriella will be working as a software developer and project manager. She got the job by talking to the company at a career fair.

“So despite my degree in engineering I kind of moved more into the software side of things,” she said. “Part of the reason I didn’t want to go straight into engineering is because as an entry level engineer they go, ‘OK, can you design this bolt for me? OK now, design a better bolt. OK now how about — you’re an aerospace engineer — how would you make the luggage compartments that go on planes?’ It doesn’t have quite the glamor that you think it might. You can’t get into management engineering without either having management elsewhere or doing a lot of that base-level engineering first.”

She said once she gains some experience at Epic she might loop back to engineering.

Gabriella also wants to complete her master’s degree at some point too, and she said the company will pay for her to get her master’s in computer science.

On top of graduating at 18 and getting a job right out of college, she said she will also have her first paper published within the next few months.

She said for a senior project she and a group came up with “utilizing unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to detect and monitor poachers” in the African Savannah.

Ideally, it would be a way to catch poachers in Botswana.

Her adventure starts this summer in July. She said she will be traveling in Europe and then right after that she will move to Wisconsin to start her career starting Aug. 5.

“It’s exciting, you know you always want to get a job right out of college and I’m really excited to be moving, although we’re leaving Seattle in about two weeks now so that is approaching incredibly quickly,” Gabriella said.