Reagan Rodely's older brother applied for the SIU Chancellor's Scholarship. He didn't get it.

Reagan was adamant she would try anyway — and her mother, Michelle, felt her background gave her a real shot. She was right. Reagan received the award: four years at Southern Illinois University, tuition covered, housing, meal plan, nearly everything paid for. The dollar amount attached is $108,000.

"I mean, the financial support is nice," her father, Bruce, says. "But I'm just glad she worked hard for it. She's earned it. She really has."

Reagan is this year's valedictorian at Du Quoin High School and an Illinois State Scholar. She's already enrolled for fall classes at SIU, where she'll study mechanical engineering with a minor in Spanish — the minor made possible by four years of dual-credit Spanish at Du Quoin, which will give her roughly eight college credits before she arrives. After her bachelor's, she plans to pursue a master's in biomedical engineering.

She knows exactly what drew her there.

During a campus visit, the chairman of SIU's mechanical engineering department personally took the Rodelys into his biomedical research lab. What Reagan saw stopped her: researchers using stem cells to replicate heart tissue, growing them into a beating patch for use in cardiac ablations.

"Stuff like that," she says — a phrase that doesn't fully capture what's behind it.

By the end of the tour, the department chair had offered her a job in the lab. She hasn't started college yet.

Reagan comes from an SIU family. Michelle and Bruce are both alumni. Her brother got his bachelor's in engineering physics from Embry-Riddle in Daytona and is now finishing his master's in mechanical engineering at SIU. Reagan heads down next fall as the third member of her family to call Carbondale home — with her own scholarship, her own plan, and a research position already waiting.

When people ask her what pressure her parents put on her, she gives the same answer.

"My dad's always just said, 'Do your best, whatever that is.'"

Bruce laughs when he hears her say that. "Just do your best. I think that's what most people want to do anyway."

The discipline that let her act on that came early and from unexpected places. Reagan has danced since age three — tap, ballet, lyrical, hip hop, musical theater — and competed since she was about eight. Michelle points out that the logistics of competitive dance are a kind of training in themselves.

"If we were spending the weekend at a competition, she still had to get her homework done," Michelle says. "Whether it was before we left Friday or in between events. That just became natural."

Reagan says the same thing more plainly: "I try to stay focused. I don't procrastinate. If I know I have to get something done, I get it done."

Her parents are also quick to share the credit with Du Quoin's schools — specifically with Diana Rea and the expansion of gifted programming that has happened under her leadership.

"She came in and really expanded those programs," Michelle says. "That gave Reagan something more to work for, more of a challenge. I really believe that's why she's been able to do what she's done."

Bruce agrees. "It wasn't just us. It was the community, the school, the environment. They fostered the kind of excitement in her where she wanted to learn more, to be more inquisitive."

Michelle and Bruce were older parents — she was 41 when Reagan was born, 35 with their son — and she credits that for how they parented.

"We were more settled," she says. "I think we parented differently because of where we were in our lives."

Their stated goal for both children was always the same: not outcomes, but options. "We wanted them to have opportunities when they graduated — whatever they chose to do," Michelle says. "If they didn't have opportunities, we had failed."

Reagan hasn't failed. She's going to college on a full ride, with a research offer already in hand and a clear-eyed sense of what she wants to build: technologies that help people. Starting, maybe, with a beating patch grown from stem cells in a lab she's already visited.

She's not dreaming about the future. She's already planning it.