JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A woman with a plan — along with 36 college acceptances and more than $1 million in scholarship money — shines bright at Atlantic Coast High School in Jacksonville.
Londyn Muhammad, a senior at Atlantic Coast, has made her family proud after being accepted into 36 colleges and universities across the nation.
“Londyn has always been very driven,” said Shamond Scales, Londyn’s father. “I would say around middle school, we (Scales and Londyn’s mother) kind of recognized that, ‘Okay, she’s you know, she’s a little different.’ But not only that, she would just [be] very, very driven… very, very consistent in her study.”
Scales told First Coast News his family moved to Jacksonville from Jackson, Tenn., during Londyn’s freshman year of high school, saying that it was his daughter’s first time outside the state.
Scales said the leap from a city with a population of less than 100,000 people to a city that’s the largest by area in the continental United States presented challenges for Londyn.
“There was a lot to overcome: the speed of the education, the speed of the culture,” Scales said. “I think that was the biggest obstacle, was just culturally trying to figure it out. It was rough on our family.”
However, that hasn’t stopped Londyn from achieving a weighted 4.6 GPA, Scales said. The young scholar has also accomplished becoming “Miss Atlantic Coast High,” being given the principal’s award from the school and serving as senior class president.
“I think Londyn’s superpower is her drive to want to be the best and to excel academically,” Scales said.
Now, as the sun sets on her last year of high school, Scales said Londyn has been very strategic with selecting a college to attend because forensic accounting, what she wants to study, is “a very, very specific area of accounting” and isn’t offered everywhere.
Scales said it is Londyn’s dream to attend Washington University, a private university in St. Louis, but explained that she’s made a verbal commitment to the University of Kentucky because she has not yet heard back from the private institution about a decision on her application.
Scales said the Gates Scholarship, a scholarship that offers $90,000 a year for five years to high school seniors, “basically made every single space (college and university) possible” for Londyn to attend. He further stated that when Londyn applied, she was one of around 48,000 applicants, and only 1,500 people were awarded it.
“She already had enough [scholarship money] to full-ride to other places before the Gates Scholarship,” Scales said. “That Gates Scholarship just said basically you can go anywhere in the United States you wanna go.”
So far, some of the universities Londyn has been accepted into include Georgia, LSU, Ole Miss, Florida State, Alabama and Auburn.
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