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WINONA LAKE - Ava Hively had no interest in going to college growing up.
However, after graduating from Warsaw Adult Education with honors at just 16 on April 12, 2024, she’s since completed her first year of college at Grace College where she’s involved in an undergraduate research internship focused around math and computer science with an orthopedic application. Hively is one of just four students handpicked for the internship.
She had been homeschooled up until sixth grade, then moving over to public school. During her seventh- through ninth-grade years, she struggled with her mental health.
“I’ve always had all A’s and great grades in school, but then my freshman year in high school, I was really suffering from mental health issues and my grades started to suffer a bit. So I decided to go back to homeschooling,” Hively said. “And then, after that, instead of continuing to either do homeschooling or go back to public school, I found out about the Adult Ed. program where I could graduate early at 16, so I decided to go that route.”
She took the classes for a couple weeks before taking the test and receiving her honors high school diploma.
In adult education, Hively went from algebra, geometry and a bit of algebra II to calculus, pulling a C+, B and then an A. She said she’s always been good at math.
“I, originally, had no interest in going to college at all, during high school or even before that. Because if I would have graduated at 18, I didn’t want to spend four years getting a degree and I’d be 22 by the time I got my degree ... so there was nothing that I thought I could go to school for, essentially. But then when I got my diploma at 16, I felt like I had all the time in the world right now,” Hively, now 17, explained.
She decided to pursue computer science. She applied to Grace College and got accepted with the Dean’s Scholarship, which requires a high grade point average.
“Being able to do something that I never thought I would is just crazy to me,” she said.
As to why she chose computer science, Hively said, “My dad got a degree in, I believe, game design or development, so I grew up around video games and stuff like that, and I really also like the technical aspects of it, so I wanted to maybe eventually go into game design with more so the computer science side of it. But I also like writing and I’m working on my own (fictional) book so I would maybe like to also go not only into the technical side of game design, but also the more creative side.”
Real World Research
For the internship, there were two math and two computer students handpicked by Dr. Amy Feaver, associate professor of computer science, and Dr. Ryan Johnson, professor of mathematics and Grace College mathematics and computer science program director. Hively was one of Feaver’s two picks.
In choosing the students, Johnson explained, “It was really a discussion between Dr. Amy Feaver, a professor of computer science, and I. Just discussing who our top students were, who were students who would do well in a research environment.”
The internship started with Dr. Fred Wentorf, who is the chair of engineering at Grace. Wentorf also has a connection to Lifejoint Orthopedic Solutions, a startup company.
“He mentioned how they were looking into the idea of a joint replacement for fingers, for finger joints; how the finger joint replacements that exist right now are awful and all the solutions that involve - like if someone was to get a large injury or have really bad arthritis - the solutions are not really there,” Johnson continued. “He wanted to know more about the statistics of finger bones, their average shape and variation.”
Johnson thought that seemed interesting so they applied for a grant through the Mathematics Association of America. “So we’re sub-grantees from them, through the National Science Foundation, the NSF,” he said. The grant application he wrote was accepted. It’s Grace’s first NSF-funded grant of this type for undergraduate research.
“It’s hard to know for sure, but part of the reason we got that grant was because of our location here in Warsaw. Our ability to promise that we would do mentoring opportunities. We got to take our students to see Zimmer Biomet, talk with a VP and a senior engineer there about careers and orthopedics. I think we’re going to meet on a Zoom call with some of the Zimmer employees in Switzerland who are doing the same thing we’re doing, but for different bones,” Johnson said.
“Being able to promise that OrthoWorx would work with us for things like this, that just all came together. It was because of relationships, the things that are special about this city. And, so we were awarded that grant and now we’ve been working on trying to look at three-dimensional CT scans of hands, and we’re trying to segment, which is identify which things are of which bones in there, and then if we get past that, then we’ll start the statistics. But right now, the segmentation has been a little harder than we thought.”
The work started June 2 and goes until July 25, Hively said.
The goal for the end result has changed a bit over as the research team has ran into different issues.
“One potential element is kind of a computer science ‘here is an open source way to segment finger bones from CT scans,’ which is normally something done with expensive software. And so, that’s one thing we’re heading towards,” Johnson said. “And then, if we get further, we’ll talk about the statistics, too. But, right now, talking about the segmentation and how we’re computing something called the Hessian matrix, and we’ve come up with an algorithm that’s a little different than what we’ve seen in the literature, so we might talk about that and how we did that.”
He said all four students - Hively, Addison Jackson, Alex Tambrini and Noah Hodge - have really been amazing.
“They’ve been really good, have really good attitudes and I’ve been working with them. We’re figuring it out together. It’s a fairly new area for me. My math relates more to quantum computing, so this has been really new to me, it’s been really exciting, really fun,” Johnson stated.
The goal with the research they’re doing is academic knowledge.
“That’s part of being open source, is showing everyone how to do it and how we did it, and then other people can look at our code, look at our mathematics and say, ‘I think it might be better to do it this way.’ And, as an academic community, we can build on each other and get better,” he said.
For the four students involved in the research, Johnson said a huge part of the grant is mentoring opportunities that are very professionally oriented.
“I talked to them about graduate school, and then we’ve met with Zimmer about what it looks like to work in a professional orthopedic realm,” he said. “These students are fairly young, they’re all going into sophomore or going into junior year, so there’s a lot of career decisions they need to make, so we’re just hoping to give them some more ideas of the broader world of jobs that require math and computer science, especially focused on orthopedics.”
Confidence Boost
Hively said the experience has taught her how to practically implement computers.
“This first year at Grace was where I mainly learned how to code and everything. I never really knew any of that before. So, being able to actually see how it can be practically implemented, as well as understanding the little techniques or different ways things work and actually looking at it from a different perspective has kind of helped me really just open my eyes to how everything works together, how everything has a connection with each other that may I wouldn’t have made before I understood it,” she said.
Hively said when she was struggling with her mental health, she had trouble seeing a good future for herself.
“I wanted to be successful, but I didn’t know how to get there. And then when I graduated from Adult Ed. early, I just had a boost of motivation, like ‘Wow! I really can do this. If I put my mind to it, I really can do anything really,’” she stated. “I just boosted my confidence in myself and my abilities. I was like, I might as well just try it. You never know unless you try it, and so instead of just limiting myself to what I think I can do, if I push my boundaries and where I thought my limits were, then I could find that, actually, your limits are up here and you can do a lot more than you think you can.”
Going forward, Hively wants to finish college, but if she goes down the path of game design and development, she also would like to work with a team of other people who are like-minded, who share creative aspects in their personality, but also want to strive to create “something greater.”
If she decides to do something more research related instead of game design, then she wants to work with a team or own a company or game studio where she can have the ability to freely implement her ideas and goals into something real.
She’d like to do something that no one thought she could do.
