Northwest’s Youngest Student Takes Advantage of Dual Enrollment Program

If you were to ask 16-year-old Richard Correro what he wants to do with his life, he’d probably tell you he wasn’t sure yet. One thing he does know is that he wants to be able to comfortably figure it out.
Correro, a tenth grade honor student at Magnolia Height School, is dually enrolled in Introduction to Logic at Northwest Mississippi Community College. The Registrar’s Office believes he is currently the youngest student at Northwest.
He is taking the class online. “I am always amazed at self- starters and how much they want to learn. Young minds are like sponges and learn any way they can. eLearning students need to be self-starters, have the drive to see things through, learn from mistakes and keep going till the end of the class. Richard seems to have these characteristics like other successful online students do,” said Phyllis Johnson, dean of eLearning at Northwest.
In order for a high school student to dually enroll at Northwest, he or she must meet certain requirements. The student must be a junior in high school, or if they are not a junior, they must have a composite ACT score or 30 or better. Correro took the ACT in June, scoring a 32. It was not his first time out with the ACT. He took it as a seventh-grader and scored a 26. In order to enroll at Northwest, he also had to have a letter of recommendation from his high school principal or guidance counselor.
Correro is not your typical 16-year-old. For example, he chose the Logic course for a specific reason. He loves Philosophy. “You have to first understand Logic in order to understand Philosophy,” Correro said. He is interested in all types Philosophy and current Philosophical research. “I figured that Logic is a class that needed to be taught to me. I felt I needed an instructor to help me if I needed it,” Correro said. At age 14, he started a super PAC called “Americans for Logic,” and is working on starting another in the near future.
Philosophy is not Correro’s only interest. He has an interest in finance, economics and the stock market. His interest began in 2009 around the lowest point of the recession. “I had heard a lot about the stock market and the recession. I was ambitious and wanted to make money,” he said. He decided to try and educate himself so he could make money, and in turn felt that would give him both the time and the opportunity to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He began “trading” at age 11. He subscribes to and reads the “Wall Street Journal” every day, as well as several economic journals. However, he says that economics is really not his passion, but more like a job. For him it is a vehicle to allow him to discover what he really wants out of life.
According to his mother Julie, who is division director of Education at Northwest, Correro has been an honor student since Kindergarten. Last year, Correro took first place in the local, district and state science fairs with his entry in the mathematics category entitled, “Predicting the Markets using Machine Language and Semantic Data Analysis.” Correro took a program by a researcher that took news reports and read them and then attempted to identify correlations between events that happened and news reports that preceded those events. He applied the algorithm used by that researcher to finance. “I tested it over three time periods. It was challenging, but it worked,” Correro said.
Correro is the son of William and Julie Correro of Senatobia. Correro attends St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church in Senatobia where he is an altar server. He is also a member of the Northwest Catholic Student Association. Both his father and his older brother Phillip are graduates of Northwest. Phillip, a former Ranger Baseball player, is now a senior at The University of Mississippi studying biology. He plans to attend medical school.
In addition to Correro, there are other high school students that are dually enrolled at Northwest. High school students who meet the requirements can take college courses for credit on any Northwest campus or online. The college also offers Dual Enrollment courses that are taught on high school campuses. If students are interested in taking courses on their high school campus, they should contact their high school counselor or Dr. Matthew Domas, associate vice president for Education at 662-562-3235 or e-mail gmdomas@northwestms.edu.
For more information about Northwest, or the dual enrollment program, visit the website at www.northwestms.edu.
LaJuan Tallo is a communications assistant at NWCC. You can contact LaJuan about this story at ltallo@northwestms.edu