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Picking their poison: national competition or high school graduation?

Now this is a decision we’re glad we don’t have to make:

Plantation High School valedictorian Mackenzie Howell had a choice: pomp and circumstance or launch and liftoff?

She chose liftoff.

While her classmates are attending graduation ceremonies, Howell, 17, will compete in the Team America National Rocketry Challenge in Virginia. Howell leads one of the school’s rocketry teams, groups of three to 15 students who spend the school year designing, building and launching rockets that bear a payload of a single raw egg.

When the school got word that six of its rocketry teams qualified for nationals in the rocketry challenge, called TARC, nearly 20 seniors faced a hard decision: go to graduation or compete in nationals?

So what is Howell going to do? 

Howell, who was on the first rocketry team her sophomore year, says she was undecided until she considered the presence Plantation High’s teams will have at this year’s nationals, and the long hours she and her teammates have spent on their rockets, working through lunch and showing up at 7 a.m. on Saturdays for test launches.

”I need to be there,” she said. “It’s where my life is.”

So she will videotape her valedictory speech, which will be broadcast at the ceremony.

Now that’s dedication.  Read the whole thing (including the comments, which are interestingly one-sided).