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Albany grad heading to the Ivy League

• A Westover High School graduate prepares for a freshman year at Yale University in August.

Joshua Brown

ALBANY – After teaching herself Spanish and later French – and winning several spoken language competitions – it was the mixing of those interests that led Westover HIgh School graduate Destiny Tolliver to seek a degree in linguistics.

She'll pursue it at Yale University.

Tolliver, 17, said that when she got her acceptance letter in mid-December, it literally took her breath away.

"I stopped breathing for a little while," she said in a recent interview. "Then I did the squealing thing. I texted all my friends 'I got into flipping Yale!' I actually spelled out 'flipping.' "

Tolliver graduated Saturday with a 4.315 grade point average thanks to several advanced placement courses, which are scored as a 5 despite the 4-point scale to compensate for difficulty level. She graduated fourth in her 239-member graduating class.

Her SAT scores were 750 in math, 800 in critical reading and 690 in writing for a cumulative 2,240, she said. The highest score in each section is 800.

Linguistics will be her major while at the university, but she will also take pre-medicine classes so she can meet requisites for medical school, she said.

Tolliver said she first thought about Yale as a potential school while a sophomore because a friend of her mother's had attended the university.

After visiting the campus a few times and attending an information session she decided the school was for her.

"That was probably what cemented it in my mind," she said before point out she had Yale flip-flops on during her interview with a reporter.

"I loved it, even though it's cold," she said about the New HAven, Conn., campus.

Tolliver said she enjoyed the students' diversity on the campus and said there were a slew of clubs available for her to consider – such as the Yale Society for the Exploration of Campus Secrets. And if there's not an organization to cater to a student's interests, school officials are pretty open to new clubs being formed, she said.

The marching band was another group she said she wanted to join, where she would play flute. While she's not interested in music as a profession, she enjoys it and would like to continue it in college, she said.

Another organization she wants to get involved with is the quarterly undergraduate magazine "The Yale Globalist," which takes several foreign trips each year and then publishes a magazine about the trips, she said.

In the meantime, though, Tolliver says she'll be working as much as she can during a summer job at a local pharmacy to prepare for a July trip to France with her mother.

While the trip is her graduation present, she and her mother have talked of visiting for years.

"My mom and I have always wanted to go, so our excuse is it's my graduation present. But it's really just us going because we have the opportunity to go," she said.

Tolliver said she will begin classes at the university in August.

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