AS A JUNIOR at Traverse City Central last year, Grady Luyt faced a dilemma. No honors English class was offered. He felt the Advanced Placement class would be too time-consuming and the standard class too boring.

Luyt found his answer at NMC. He dual-enrolled in an online English course for the spring 2021 semester, earning college credit in one semester instead of the year the AP class would require.

“The class here wound up being the Goldilocks class,” said Luyt, 18.

He also liked the taste of college life. He subsequently enrolled in Calculus III last semester, and Differential Equations this semester.

“You’re more responsible for your own education,” said Luyt, who’s also a National Merit Scholarship semi-finalist, a distinction based on his PSAT scores and earned by less than 1 percent of high school seniors. He will be able to transfer his NMC credits to Michigan Tech, where he’s already been accepted, or the University of Michigan, his top two choices for his planned engineering major.

“You’re saving a lot of money, and you’re saving time,” Luyt said of dual enrollment. The public school district, not the student, is responsible for paying tuition.

When not in class, Luyt spends most of his time with Central’s FIRST Robotics team.

He joined the Raptors as a freshman and is now the technical lead, overseeing the build, electrical and programming leads in the endeavor to build a competitive robot.

“It’s the hardest fun you’ll ever have,” Luyt said, adding that learning to collaborate and communicate with teammates and meet deadlines are also part of the robotics team experience.

“Those skills are as important if not more important than the mechanical skills,” Luyt said.

Engineering, after all, is a natural fit for the lifelong basement tinkerer. As a middle school student he built a go-kart from a free snowblower he found at the side of the road. As an eighth grader he built a playable PacMan Halloween costume. It was hard to move in, but with the strategic choice of a friend’s Slabtown yard as his base, Luyt found the trick-or-treaters came to him.

“I charged one candy per play and got all my candy that way,” he said.

In the robotics off-season, he works at Brick Wheels and is involved with the Norte youth cycling group, including its youth advisory board. Whatever he’s doing, he tries to focus as much on his journey as his destination, and is grateful dual enrollment was part of his high school years.

“The process is always at least half the fun,” he said.