User:Joseph Paul Florence

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Joseph Paul Florence (5 December 1988 - Present) is a 19 year old undergraduate student in the College of Engineering at the University of Alabama. He is currently pursuing a B.S. degree in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a member of the Computer-Based Honors Program and resides at Ridgecrest West, one of the newer apartment-style dormitories on the north end of the campus.

[edit] Early Life

Joseph was born to parents Marie and Glenn Florence at Medical Center East (now St. Vincent's East). At the time, they resided on Cheshire Drive in a townhouse of the Grayson Valley suburb. Until 1992, he lived there with his parents and two half-sisters, Rebecca Hargraves and Sarah O'Kelley (Crump). Then, the family moved to 1928 Westridge Drive, a 1970s house in an average middle-lower class neighborhood in between Chalkville, Trussville, and Huffman; Joseph has called the house at Westridge Drive his permanent residence ever since. At the age of 3, he began pre-Kindergarten at Hilldale Baptist Church. At the age of 5, he began his public education proper with enrollment in the Kindergarten class at Chalkville Elementary School - the same school both of his sisters had attended. He "graduated" from this school at the end of fifth grade. Joseph spent his sixth, seventh, and eighth grades of school at Clay-Chalkville Middle School. In his last year, he applied for enrollment at the Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School in Irondale, Alabama, an advanced alternative to the normal high school path.

[edit] High School

At the age of 14, Joseph transitioned to the JCIBS, a limited-enrollment, public magnet school that played host to the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. This move separated him from the body of peers many of whom he had long since schooled with, but a few of his friends also opted to attend. Through his high school career, Joseph progressed through the IBDP at a manageable pace. The foreign language he chose to study was German, and he pursues this study to this day, despite a rocky start and three different instructors throughout high school. Excelling at mathematics, to a certain extent, Joseph participated as a member of the math team under the direction of Tommy Abney, teacher and math team coordinator at the JCIBS. Abney actually taught Joseph for two years in middle school, and had hooked him on the idea of mathematics competitions from an early age. Joseph's performance garnered little recognition, though he was awarded a few trophies at various public and invitational mathematics competitions across the state. After the final two years of work, Joseph graduated from the JCIBS with an Advanced Academic Diploma, and was eventually awarded an International Baccalaureate Diploma, with 34 out of 45 possible points earned.

[edit] Collegiate Life

During his junior year in high school, Joseph began considering his secondary education. By the end of that school year, Joseph had applied to all of the schools he was considering attending: the University of Georgia, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Berry College, and the University of Alabama. Visits to each helped him to assess their strengths and weaknesses, yet to a marginal extent his decision seemed destined to depend on scholarship offers. His naming as a National Merit Scholar greatly affected this case, as the University of Alabama is known for its National Merit Scholarships. However, his application to and acceptance into the Computer-Based Honors Program at the University sealed his decision. Upon learning of the program's potential for advancing his computer programming knowledge exponentially and setting him up for undergraduate research, Joseph eagerly awaited the outcome of his competition for membership.