Kaitlyn Newell heads out of her Kingsland home each morning for one of her summer jobs with just one exciting revelation remaining in a path to New Haven, Conn.

The 2008 Llano High Valedictorian found out she had been accepted on an early-admission application to Yale University in December and she visited the campus in April.

Like Oxford and Cambridge in England, Yale is organized in a residential college system. Kaitlyn soon will learn in which of the 12 close-knit “houses” she will be unpacking her bags in August.

Along with her classmate, Valerie Hoerster, Newell was a National Merit Scholar finalist. But she hadn’t really thought of herself as one of the intellectual elite.

“When I first applied, Yale was the school I was never going to get into and I wanted to know how it felt and get it out of the way,” she said.

“I hadn’t actually told more than one person in the entire Llano School System that I’d applied,” she said. “Somehow on Dec. 14 everyone found out and that the results were coming out that day. It was supremely ironic.

“I found out online. I just couldn’t wait and in my last period art class I checked the admission status. A blue stream with a little bulldog floated up.”

“I didn’t scream, but I almost fell out of my chair,” Newell continued. “I told Mrs. Haynes, ‘I totally got accepted to college.’ She asked where. I said, ‘Yale,’ and then she screamed.”

That was the first day Newell learned that the mascot was the Yale Bulldog known as Handsome Dan and the first day she had really thought about what it would take to attend an Ivy League College.

Yale is the third oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Yale College, the undergraduate school has around 5,200 students, taught by 3,200 faculty members in classes that average about 20 students. Another 6,000 graduate students attend Yale University.

Every U.S. President since 1989 and a long list of candidates for the post since 1972 has been a graduate of Yale.

Yet, owing to the country’s second largest endowment of $22.5 billion and a decision to spend much more of its income on students, Newell was relieved to learn that she will be investing more hard work than money in the experience.

For the Class of 2012, Yale accepted 1,892 students out of the 22,813 total early and regular applicants, hitting a University record-low acceptance rate at 8.3 percent, but Yale President Richard C. Levin announced the month that two new residential colleges will be established to increase enrollment by 15 percent (to about 6,000) students. Despite that Yale has cut costs to students by 50 percent and established a policy that families earning less than $60,000 annually will not make any contribution toward the cost of a child’s education, and families earning $60,000 to $120,000 will typically contribute from one percent to 10 percent of total family income.

Newell hasn’t given up her babysitting job and, channeling her artistic interests she works part time at Sakow Cards in Old Oak Square in Marble Falls for an artist who paints and sells her own hand painted cards.

The new Yalie was born in Iowa and moved to Llano County via Austin. She is the daughter of Kristin Galle, pastor of Marbach Christian Church in San Antonio, and Brent Hampton, Pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Marble Falls.

She laughs good-naturedly about the roll call on the “clergy clan” greeting on the answering machine at her Kingsland home.

“We’re a blended family and we have three different last names,” she said. “I have a younger sister, Moriah, who is a sophomore at Llano High, a younger half-brother, Corey, at Liberty Hill, and an older stepsister, Rachel at Southwestern University.”

The resulting large, interconnecting family has yielded a number of contacts for her new Connecticut home-away-from-home.

Newell also met a number of future Yale classmates at Bulldog Days at the school in April and six more at a recent event for her and six new Austin freshmen hosted by Yale alums in the area.

She will have 70 majors to choose from at Yale and choices that range from art to world religion to math are swimming in her head.

Diversity has never bothered Newell. At Llano High she took a University Interscholastic League state second in ready writing and she placed in UIL news writing and social studies. She was UIL all-district best actress for her role as Hester Swane in the LHS production of By the Bog of Cats and she was a state qualifier in the Vase Art Show. She played the French horn in the Yellow Jacket Marching Band.

The sights of Monaco, of Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, and of Florence and Rome, Italy, thrilled her earlier this month. She was one of 40 people, including 19 students, who went on the biennial school trip under the direction of LHS government and history teacher Larry Leifeste.

With fresh eyes on the wider world she says she is ready for the East Coast and her first year at Yale.