MTSU senior credits dual enrollment program with fast-tracking her academically, professionally

An MTSU student is one semester away from graduating and already working her dream job at just 20 years old. She credits the university’s Dual Enrollment program for jump-starting her academic and professional life.

Psychology major Haley Burt, a Murfreesboro, Tennessee, native, started high school at 13 and college at just 15 years old. Of course, she was still in high school, but that was still an early start for your typical dual enrollment student.

“My mom had homeschooled me and I really wanted to be a part of this mock trial team,” she said. “I was only in eighth grade, but I convinced my mom to let me try and test into a higher grade and I did it.”

Burt said her mom made her a deal that if she made good grades she could stay in the higher grade, but if not, she would move back down to eighth grade. Burt excelled and has hardly looked back. She graduated high school just a couple of months after turning 17 and had already earned 24 credits through dual enrollment.

Burt’s first course was in 2017, an intro to music class. She said that she and her mom did not really know what dual enrollment was going to be like, so she was just going to “get her feet wet.”

“Immediately after that class I thought it was all kind of cool,” she said. “I actually ended up making friends, which I was really worried about.”

Her next class was a general psychology class, which just so happens to be her major now. Then, a criminal justice course, her minor now, and then she actually was brave enough to try a full college course load the first semester of her senior year of high school.

“I remember in my classes, which were on campus, on the first day they’d go through everyone and ask our name and our major,” Burt said, laughing. “So I’d always say, ‘Hey, my name is Haley, and I don’t have a major because I don’t really go here but when I do it will be criminal justice.’”

She says it sort of threw everyone for a loop, but she was never treated any differently by any of the students or professors. She remembers thinking she looked like a 12-year-old walking around a campus full of 20-somethings.”

“It was daunting at first, but then my second semester I said, ‘You know what? I am killing it,’” she said. “I was walking around campus like I knew what I was doing.”

She sparked a mentorship with two of her dual enrollment professors from those psychology and criminal justice courses, having known from the time she was 8 years old that she wanted to work in criminal justice.

She set up a meeting with her psychology professor, Seth Marshall, and told him she wanted to be a criminal profiler but was not interested in becoming a police officer.

“He said, ‘Okay, cool, we are going to set you on the right track,’” Burt remembers. “He wasn’t my adviser — I didn’t even have an adviser then, but he talked me through which psychology classes to take next.”

As for Marshall, he remembers Burt as a student who appreciated the non-academic side of the college experience. “She had the understanding of how important it is for students to talk to faculty about their goals,” he said. “The ability to be mentored is so important.”

Marshall called Burt an impressive and driven student and is looking forward to seeing what she does with her career.

For more information about MTSU’s Dual Enrollment program, call 615-898-5246, email dualenrollment@mtsu.edu or visit https://www.mtsu.edu/dualenrollment/apply.php.