High School Dropouts of Note

Here's an interesting piece in Forbes by Helen Coster.

She begins, "For some, diplomas are (barely) worth the paper they're printed on. These star entrepreneurs jumped right in." But we already knew that!

http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/30/millionaires-without-high-school-diplomas-entrepreneurs-finance-millionaire.html

Young People bypassing High School

A mother writes in about her daughter:

Unschooled until grade nine, Amica entered a local high school at the regular age. She maintained high grades, gained early acceptance to University of Western Ontario, and the like, but opted to head to Toronto to pursue a career in dance.

She had at this point already obtained a teaching certificate for both ballet and highland dance and had some teaching experience.

While dancing at a professional studio in Toronto and slugging it out working at the dreaded Gap to make her rent, Amica decided to try out some yoga classes at Toronto's premiere yoga studio, The Downward Dog.
Since classes were beyond her budget limitations she quickly established a barter agreement- trading cleaning duties for yoga classes.The studio soon offered Amica administrative work rather than cleaning duties, and since the pen is always preferable to the broom, she switched-up the barter and carried on.

The barter developed into a full-time, paying job. She advance her position to assistant manager of the down town studio location.

Successfully merchandising for two of the Downward Dog studio's there was discussion of Amica heading -up a new development for a Downward Dog store front, but having vowed to never enter retail again, Amica declined the proposal and the studio scratched the idea.

Amica began to teach community yoga classes. While working at the studio Amica dabbled in creating business cards for studio members, so when an issue developed with the studio's regular graphic design person, they asked her if she might try her hand at some of this work.

The graphic design work quickly developed into Amica's main focus.

Currently, Amica works full time doing graphic design for the Down ward Dog studio from her home in Toronto, she is one of the studio's faculty teachers, conducts a weekly yoga class and assists workshops.

Most recently, Amica returned from a trip to Thailand where she assisted teaching at the world renowned, Thailand Yoga Centre. Amica is twenty-four years old.

Young People bypassing High School

A Dundas, Ontario mother writes about her 17 years old daughter who has been home educated all her life:

She works in the kitchen at an upscale restaurant in the pastry division. She started out with simple tasks like making cookies but is now learning bread baking and more complicated desserts.
She also worked for 6 weeks in November/December for Ontario Ballet Theatre- two weeks of preparing and 4 weeks touring Ontario. She was a paid dancer, last year she was a paid apprentice for them.
She auditioned for Boston Ballet very recently and was accepted into their summer program for this summer.

She also intends to audition for some programs for next year including the Alberta Ballet and American Ballet Theatre and Kirov in Washington and possibly others.
She has performed for her ballet school- Hamilton City Ballet- last year in the principal role of the full version of Coppelia and for six years before that in various roles, including solos.

Previously she performed with Canadian Ballet Youth Ensemble along with Ballet Ouest and with Ballet Nacional de Cuba.

She has trained at Hamilton City Ballet for 8 years now, and with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in Cuba (the past two summers- 2weeks and 3 weeks).