As she was leaving the high school commons, Amanda Osterholt was toting a gift bag complete with helium-filled balloons.

She hugged her son goodbye and asked if he wanted to keep the balloons.

“Can you leave the Dr. Pepper?” replied her son.

That was a typical teenager response from a teenager who is anything but typical.

Just moments before, Brayden Osterholt had signed to attend Yale University in a ceremony at the Kingfisher High School commons.

The senior was surrounded by family and sat in front of hundreds of fellow KHS students and faculty, who cheered on his major accomplishment.

“There are high requirements to even apply,” said KHS Assistant Principal Colby Connel during the ceremony. “They get 50,000 applicants each year and, of those, they only accept 4.6 percent.”

Osterholt’s journey was a bit tougher.

He was announced last fall as a finalist for the prestigious Questbridge Match Scholarship program.

QuestBridge is a national nonprofit that connects the nation’s most exceptional youth from lower-income families with leading institutions of higher education.

Finalists are able to rank up to 15 colleges in Questbridge’s network to be “matched” – admitted early with a Match Scholarship – to the college that appears highest on their list that also wants to match with them.

Those who “match” with a college or university are notified on Dec. 1 and will receive a full four-year scholarship.

Finalists who do not match or choose not to rank colleges can use the Quest-Bridge application to apply to college partners through other early and regular decision opportunities.

That was the path chosen by Osterholt and that path will lead him to the Ivy League school in New Haven, Conn.

As Connel pointed out, the acceptance rate for students in that program is only 3.17 percent.

“So that’s a very small window there,” Connel added.

The impressive numbers cited by Connel - whether large or small - didn’t stop there.

Osterholt is one of just 66 students who matched with Yale through the program… out of 25,500 applicants.

He’s one of six students from Oklahoma accepted into next year’s freshman class at Yale.

He’s the first every KHS student to attend Yale, which is more than 300 years old and is the third oldest university in the nation.

He’s going to go and make us proud.

“This is a tremendous honor for Brayden and a tremendous honor for us, so we want to celebrate him for that today,” Connel said.

••• Osterholt said his top choice was Duke, but Yale was a nice fallback plan.

In fact, it was Yale that reached out to him first and said he’d been accepted.

“I got the news and it just didn’t feel real, because it’s Yale,” Osterholt said.

As it turned out, Duke didn’t make the match, but Osterholt was unbothered.

“I was still ecstatic about Yale,” he said. “I’m so excited to be able to get out there and go to a super-prestigious university and be able to pursue my education.” Osterholt knows firsthand the difficulty to apply to, go through the process of and then be accepted into some of the top universities in the country. Still, he said, even he was impressed as he sat and listened to the stats that were relayed by his principal. “Definitely hearing those numbers out loud - because I’d heard the small acceptance rate and this and that - but hearing the numbers really put into perspective how tremendous of an opportunity this is.”

••• Osterholt has certainly earned the opportunity.

There are the usual accolades: He’s been inducted into the National Honor Society and Oklahoma Honor Society. He’s a class valedictorian. He’s the winner of the 4.0 Award. He’s an Oklahoma Boys delegate. He’s active in drama, theatre and the academic team.

There are also things that set him further apart, such as his performance on the ACT exam.

He’s scored a 36 (a perfect score) on both the reading and math portions of the exam.

His ACT superscore IS a 36. That’s arrived at by averaging the best individual section scores from multiple ACT test attempts and rounded to the nearest whole number.

Among those at the signing ceremony was his mother, Amanda Osterholt.

“Brayden constantly amazes me with what he does,” she said. “It’s been that way since he was a toddler! I am so proud of what he has accomplished so far and I know that he will continue to astonish me.

“I can’t wait to see what happens in this next chapter for him!”

••• The road is leading Osterholt to Connecticut.

He’s clear on his path once he gets there: He’ll pursue a degree in environmental engineering.

“He’s one of those students who has always had a clear vision for his future,” said KHS Counselor Paula Leffingwell. “With the Questbridge program, he took the time and did the research to find the exact colleges he wanted to apply to and now he has a solid plan in place.”

Osterholt said he can see a couple of different outlooks for his professional life.

“I would love to work cleaning up mine sites that have been abandoned or are no longer in use,” he said.

He brought up Picher, now a ghost town in northeastern Oklahoma, but was once a major hub of lead and zinc mining.

Severe environmental contamination from that mining forced the town to be abandoned.

“I would love to go in and clean up scenarios like that,” he said.

The alternate scenario, he said, also involved mining.

“I would want to help find more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways to extract minerals from their ores,” he said.

Osterholt specifically referenced lithium.

“We use a lot of lithium batteries in our day-to-day lives. And I could definitely see lithium batteries increasing in usage over the next couple of decades just because kind of a push for greener energy, which usually includes a lot of batteries.”

Most hybrid and electric vehicles use lithium-ion batteries.

As the demand for those kinds of vehicles grows, so will the need for lithium.

“And so because the current process for both mining and getting lithium out of the ore releases a lot of greenhouse gases, I would love to work on that or try and find a way to do that less harmfully,” Osterholt said.

“I would like to pitch in and do my part in keeping our earth green.”

••• While Brayden was busy amazing his mother, she was steadily urging him to always do better.

“She has almost independently raised me for most of my life. And she has always pushed me, knowing that I can do better and wanting me to do better,” he said. “She’s definitely one of the reasons that I like applied to Questbridge.

“I was unsure of it at first because of how much stuff there was to it, but she pushed for me to continue it and finish it out and I’m so glad that she did.”

The scholarship through Questbridge handles all of Osterholt’s expenses, which is estimated to be close to $100,000 a year.

“That’s another number that’s pretty astounding,” Osterholt said.

The commitment on Osterholt’s end was made without even stepping foot on Yale’s campus.

That will change this week when he and his mother will visit the university.

He’ll make the move for good this summer.

“I’m looking forward to it because I love experiencing new things and new people in new places,” he said, adding that traveling is among his favorite things to do.

“So I’m super excited for the opportunity to go to Connecticut and experience a whole new world.”

Count Leffingwell among those who believe in his ability to succeed.

“I have no doubt that Brayden will be successful in his college career and the years beyond,” she said. “And I can’t wait to watch him evolve!”