Statesboro High School senior Eli Compton was named Bulloch County's STAR Student Jan. 31. On Tuesday, he was named the 2024 Region 8 STAR Student along with Savannah Country Day's Emiline Baxter during a luncheon at Georgia Southern University.

Both Compton and Baxter recorded SAT scores of 1590, just 10 points short of perfect. And they not only share identical SAT scores, they both plan to go to Georgia Tech and both plan to study aerospace engineering.

Compton said he hopes to have a career in designing vehicles for autonomous and staffed missions in space.

"Pretty much anything in the space industry would do for me, though NASA is kind of a dream job," he said.

The Region 8 STAR competition encompasses 17 other school systems. The region banquet is held annually on the Georgia Southern campus and is hosted by the Statesboro Exchange Club. As Region 8 winners, Compton and Baxter now advance to the state STAR competition, sponsored by the Professional Association of Georgia Educators.

SHS chemistry teacher Ashley Thompson joined Compton at Tuesday's event as his STAR teacher.

After the Jan. 31 Bulloch County STAR Student Banquet, Thompson said: "Eli is one of the finest students I have worked with in 16 years. He has a passion for science. He has a passion for learning; he likes to dig deep and understand things on a molecular level, and so he works hard, and he's just every teacher's dream."

Compton, 17, is the son of Matthew Compton, Ph.D., a member of the sociology and anthropology faculty at Georgia Southern University, and Stephanie Compton, M.Ed., principal of Julia P. Bryant Elementary School.

Compton attended the Governor's Honors Program in chemistry in the summer of 2023. He competes on the SHS Math Team and in Science Quiz Bowl, "like you would kind of expect of someone who enjoys science like I do," he said.

While still a Statesboro High student, he is dual-enrolled at Georgia Southern, currently taking Calculus III and Physics I. Back in eighth grade, he won the Savannah Regional Science Fair. He participated in the State Science Fair in both seventh and eighth grades, when his continuing project involved testing the tensile strength of 3D-printer filaments of different price points, and he went to the Broadcom Masters Tournament in eighth grade.

For Thompson, it was the first time she was selected as a STAR teacher in her 16 years of teaching, all at Statesboro High. Compton was in her Honors chemistry and Advanced Placement chemistry classes the two previous years.

"I always enjoyed her class, both in my 10th grade, and especially my 11th-grade year," he said. "She always, like, broke down the concepts and made them really fun and engaging, and made her class into definitely one of the better parts of my day."

Provided they meet other basic criteria, such as ranking among the top 10 students or top 10% of their senior class in grade point average, STAR students are those who attain their school's highest scores from a single sitting of the SAT college admissions test. A perfect score would be 1600, including 800 in the reading and writing section and 800 in the math section.