On Mother’s Day, Sunday May 8, Charleston Lee graduated from Paine College with a degree in mathematics. At 17, she is the youngest graduate of the historically Black school, an accomplishment that certainly wasn’t lost on Lee’s classmates.
“People perceived me as more than I am,” said Lee, who started taking courses at Paine at 12, enrolled as a full-time student at 14 and was elected president of the Student Government Association at 16. “They thought I was Einstein; they thought I knew everything.”
MORE: Photojournalism: Harlem High graduation
Lee describes the lighthearted teasing from some of her peers as “good-natured fun,” based on their age gap. But while her intelligence and academic acumen were impressive enough to bring her to college at an age where most kids are just leaving middle school, Lee also says she sometimes had to remind her fellow undergraduates that, she was only a student—and recent high school graduate—just like them.
“My age wasn’t perceived as a hinderance,” said Lee, noting that her youth didn’t prove a distraction in the classroom. “Professors didn’t care. I was comprehending the material.”
Like most teenagers, Lee’s interests expand far beyond academics.
“I love to read,” she said, saying her literary interests include fiction and nonfiction in a variety of subjects; and dovetail with further intellectual interests that include watching documentaries and game shows. This has made her a formidable colleague on the Trivia Team.
“Which is probably why my peers think, ‘Oh, she knows everything,” Lee said.
MORE: Small class produces several top students in Richmond County
Lee admits that being as young as she is, she wasn’t always so sure which direction she wanted to go with her education, but that computer science and related disciplines have remained heavy on her mind for at least a year.
“Math was not my original major,” she said. “I wanted to go into software engineering, but Paine didn’t have the program.”
Lee explored several majors, including psychology, sociology, business and accounting (as her mother is Paine history professor Kimberly Baxter-Lee, she was already all too familiar with history).
MORE: Richmond and Columbia County Valedictorians and Salutatorians Class of 2022
She even briefly majored in biology for pre-med, until she learned that would eventually entail studying cadavers.
“So biology was out for me,” Lee said.
Mathematics, a subject she already enjoyed, was the closest major to data science and software engineering, and so she settled there. Lee says the seed for her deep interest in computers was planted when she was eight years old, watching the television crime series “Criminal Minds”—which she admits she shouldn’t have been watching at that age—and being impressed with the character of Penelope Garcia, who’s a technical analyst on the show.
MORE: Photojournalism: Academy of Richmond County graduation
This led to a further interest in data and programming, researching coding on YouTube and learning about organizations like Black Girls Code, which offers tech education to African American girls.
“When I found out you could make this a career, you can do things with that, I took off from there,” Lee said.
The relatively new field of data science is the direction Lee is setting her postgraduate sights on, hoping to work for Google someday. While she’s still deciding where to go next, she has already been accepted into both Georgia Tech and Meharry Medical College in Tennessee, and is waiting for a response from Vanderbilt University, all of which have graduate data science and computer science programs.
Wherever she goes, the young scholar aims to work with computers, saying data science represents a “perfect world of both” of her current passions, “math and computer science.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering education in Columbia County and business-related topics for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
