Future is Bright, indeed

If there is one thing you can say about Shianne Bright – she certainly is driven.

The North Central High School senior, who will graduate on Saturday, is a master at finding scholarships to attend Gonzaga University.

The list of scholarships she has received is a long one. She received a $48,000 and two $20,000 scholarships from Gonzaga, a $13,600 Washington Award for Vocational Excellence scholarship, plus several others to help her pay what she said turns out to be $160,000 in tuition, room, board, living and school supply costs for the next four years.

“I made a list of every scholarship I was eligible for,” she said.

She kept organized about the due dates for all of them and thinks she probably sent out around 15 applications.

“Nobody realizes how many scholarships are out there,” she said.

Bright said she pretty much received every scholarship she applied for, and thanks to her efforts, she has a full ride through college.

It’s an accomplishment that many students probably don’t appreciate as much as she does, since for the last year, she has been living at her aunt’s house, paying for her own food, car insurance, phone and school expenses. She works full-time at Sonic Drive-In to pay for these items and has been able to save up enough money to pay cash for her car.

“It’s working out pretty good so far,” she said.

She grew up in Spokane, but her mother got into trouble and moved to Ellensburg one day. There was no room at her dad’s house, so she turned to her aunt.

Bright said she grew up without receiving a lot of direction from her mother and has relied on her relationships with her teachers to get her through the tough times.

At Sonic, she spends a lot of nights working on roller skates into the late hours. There is also homework and going to class.

Admittedly, she has missed a lot of classes, but her teachers know about her living situation and she always stays after school to get help in any missed class and stays on top of her homework.

“I had to put things into perspective,” she said. If she had been up late studying or filling out another scholarship application after work, she realized that she could go to class and fall asleep there, or she could get another hour of sleep at home and then come in after school.

When her appendix burst during her sophomore year, she had to catch up with her school work and soon learned what days it was important to go to class and when it wasn’t.

“That’s how it’s going to be in college,” she noted.

She also said that she was accepted into the business school at the University of Washington, and although she was still leaning toward Gonzaga, the family of the owners of Sonic made sure she at least checked out UW before she made her decision. They even drove her to Seattle to make sure she had an opportunity to sit in on some classes.

Those classes are what convinced her to go to Gonzaga. She was surprised that the class sizes are so large, and it would be difficult to form relationships with her teachers in classes that big.

She said that if she didn’t have such a good relationship with her teachers at North Central, she probably wouldn’t have made it through high school.

“I’m really going to miss those teachers,” she said. She said her teachers have been sort of a surrogate family for her.

“Everybody’s leaving,” she said of herself and her classmates. “Those relationships are gone. That’s sad to me.”

And missing class hasn’t hurt her grades. She has a 3.97 grade-point average.

Along with everything else, Bright is heavily involved with the Distributive Education Clubs of America. This year she was president of DECA at North Central.

She really didn’t know what field she wanted to pursue when she signed up for her first business class her junior year of high school, but the bookkeeping classes appealed to her love of numbers.

“I’ve always been really good at math,” she said.

These classes led her to want to be an accountant when she graduates from Gonzaga.

“I wish I would have gone into it earlier,” she said.

When Bright attends Gonzaga in the fall, she hopes to live in the leadership dorm at the school. And she hopes that her roommate will be another notable student, Carly Williams from Rogers High School.

The two have known each other since they were very small but soon lost contact. They had an opportunity to renew their friendship when they both attended Garry Middle School.

In four years don’t be surprised if Williams enters the Spokane business world as an accountant. If she sets her mind to it, it will happen.