Bradyn McClintock doesn't particularly enjoy being uncomfortable. He just keeps volunteering for it. "I've always wanted to be the person that a teacher called on," he said, which sounds unremarkable until he explains that speaking in front of people has never come naturally to him. Being called on makes him uncomfortable. That's exactly why he wants it. "I wanted to get pushed out of my comfort zone."

A senior at Vandalia High School, Bradyn has spent four years chasing exactly that kind of discomfort: band and percussion, now drum major; National Honor Society, now its president; Code Red, the student spirit group; track, where he threw and says simply, "the people made it really fun"; Spanish all the way through its fourth year, now down to just six students in the class; and this year, Fayette County CEO, the program built to push students into unfamiliar rooms with real business owners and expect them to communicate, build relationships, and think entrepreneurially. Only a few weeks in, Bradyn had already noticed something unexpected: himself. "I did not expect to see a lot of change in three weeks," he said.

For his own eventual CEO business, Bradyn is leaning toward something sweet. He's baked with his mother since he was three or four, and she comes by it honestly; she used to teach junior high before becoming principal at St. Elmo, and was famous in the teachers' lounge for the treats she'd bring in. Bradyn's thinking cakes and cookies rather than the sourdough everyone else seems obsessed with these days, though nothing's settled yet. He came into CEO genuinely unsure whether entrepreneurship even interested him. After a few weeks talking with local business owners and picking up real fundamentals of how they operate, he can see himself doing it. "There are always opportunities," he said. "Just a matter of if you take them or not." Bradyn seems determined to keep taking them, partly because that's just who he is. "Shoot for the clouds, I guess," he said, explaining the high standards he holds for himself without much fuss.

He hopes to attend the University of Illinois, majoring in Spanish with an eye toward international business through the university's well-regarded Gies College of Business, or Illinois State as his backup, where he's already been accepted to Eastern Illinois while he waits to hear from ISU. Travel genuinely excites him, and he can picture a career that takes him somewhere beyond Illinois entirely. Spanish didn't start until freshman year, and some days it's genuinely hard. His response is characteristically blunt: "Why go so far just to stop?"

That determination runs into some real costs, too. His ACT score came in lower than he'd hoped, in part because he'd had a track meet the night before and didn't get home until around 10:30. He decided not to submit it, plainly aware it wasn't his best work, without much drama attached to the decision either way.

Bradyn also sees something about Vandalia itself in his own experience. Small towns get defined, often unfairly, by what people assume they can't offer. He sees it differently. "Our school is really nice in the sense that all the opportunities that you can have through this school," he said. He points to cousins attending a small private school nearly 40 minutes away that, for all its own name recognition, doesn't offer anything close to what he's had access to here: a fourth year of Spanish, CEO, marching band leadership, NHS, athletics, and a stack of clubs on top of it. "We're a small town," he said, and then, without missing a beat, started listing everything the town's given him anyway. Vandalia can't manufacture ambition in a kid. It can make sure that ambition has somewhere real to go.

Senior year has brought its own quieter adjustments, too. Bradyn describes his friend group as "slowly growing apart" as everyone changes in different directions, some for the better, some not. When he looks for a friend, he says he mostly just looks for the good in someone, regardless of whether they share his particular hunger to be pushed. More than once, he's found himself trying to help a friend get more comfortable in a situation that was clearly stretching them, essentially doing for others what CEO is currently doing for him.

CEO has given him a phrase he's held onto since he first heard it from a guest speaker: "There is no comfort in your growing zone." He believes it fully. "I don't think you can really grow as a person and be super comfortable with it," he said. Next year will test that theory for real: a campus far bigger than Vandalia, strangers, harder classes, unfamiliar rooms, maybe eventually another country entirely. Bradyn admits he gets nervous about plenty of it. He's just built a habit of looking past the nervousness toward whatever's waiting on the other side, one club, one leadership role, one harder class, one uncomfortable room at a time. Whatever's next, Bradyn McClintock already knows exactly what he wants from the people around him when things get hard.

Call on me.