An immense feeling of happiness and relief is what senior Marcus Grimes felt as he stood on stage and received a massive college scholarship, entirely unexpected. 

Marcus is part of the first graduating class and last month he was flown to Atlanta by Chick-fil-a to be given a $25,000 scholarship, yet he didn’t even know why he was really there until it happened.

“Since we’re employees, our operators told us that we were going to go do something dealing with designing uniforms,” Marcus said. “But then when we got there, they took us to this huge building called the Support Center. They walked us inside and then revealed the surprise.” 

Marcus has been working at Chick-fil-A in Buda for over a year to prepare for college finances, and he has very quickly moved up in employee ranking. 

“I started off as a regular team member and then I was promoted to a trainer after five or six months,” Marcus said. 

 Marcus’ college of choice is The University of Texas at Austin. There he will study Civil Engineering, a passion of his since he was young. 

“Starting in elementary school I was introduced to a scaled down form of coding pretty early on, and I also just enjoyed to build things as a kid. Then when I got to middle school they had us working with CAD, computer aided design, so I was put into that environment at an early age and I liked it y’know,” Marcus said. “I don’t like engineering because I think I should, but I actually do like it, like CAD, coding, and similar things. It was interesting to me so I just kept with it.” 

When asked, Marcus had two people in particular he thanked for his success in life. 

“I would thank my parents because they raised me well, and I don’t think I would’ve turned out the way I did if it weren’t for them,” Marcus said. “So I’d say my parents.”