Right about the time most of her high school classmates were fretting about prom, permits, and PSATs, Katherine "Katie" Gross was obsessed with getting her license.

Right about the time most of her high school classmates were fretting about prom, permits, and PSATs, Katherine "Katie" Gross was obsessed with getting her license.

Her pilot's license.

"I wanted to get it before I was 18, so I pretty much gave up violin lessons and severely cut down on human contact," says Gross, 19, now a GT-AE sophomore.

"My softball coach competed with my dance coach for practice time because I started spending all my free time at the airport. I stopped going out with friends on Friday night and started getting up really early to get flying time."

How early?

"4 a.m. " she says with a shrug of the shoulders.

"If the weather was good I could get in a couple hours of flying before I had to be in school. If it was bad, I went to school and studied until my first class."

Gross's determination paid off . Not only did the Ohio native earn her pilot's license before graduating high school, she was invited to help build a Rans Coyote plane by one of her flying mentors, and recently breezed through her pilot's license renewal. Along the way, she got into her first choice - Georgia Tech - where she snagged a coveted co-op job three weeks into her freshmen year.

Again, she shrugs her shoulders:

"I went to the AE Career Fair just to get practice talking to employers. I didn't have a [college] GPA and my resume didn't have anything really...well, except that I had a pilot's license and I'd built a plane...they thought that was pretty cool."

Not everyone always saw it that way.

"I think, to some people in high school, I was that crazy girl who just wanted to fly all the time. 'Well, I'm flying a plane while you're going to the mall. So who wins in that competition?'"

Thing is: there is no competition. Not externally. Katie Gross is so intensely focused on her own goals that the rest of the world quietly fades to background -- like the rolling farmlands and forests that stretch below her when she's flying back in Ohio.

She does get nervous, but, as anyone who knows her will tell you: it's more out of reverence than insecurity. She deeply respects the knowledge that others possess.

The first time she showed up at the Geauga County [Ohio] airport to begin her informal mentorship she was so nervous, she barely made a peep. Her mentors [retired engineer David Rigotti and pilot Tim Connor] did all the talking.

"I was 16 and I thought, somehow, I could break something, so I was afraid to touch things," she said.

"But Dave and Tim were really good about showing me how to do things [airplane maintenance] and then weaning me off their help. They pushed me in there to do it myself and I did."

Gross was also nervous the night before her first pilot's exam - a challenging written test. Though she had spent countless hours studying the Federal Aviation Regulations Aeronautical Information Manual (FAR AIM), she was stunned by how much there was to know.

"The FAA evaluators see exactly what you miss on your written test, and  they grill you on it in your oral. I've heard of some orals that go three, four, five hours. You can't just get by. They want you to know it all. Cold."

Gross earned an 84 on that test -- enough to qualify for the oral, but not enough to let her relax.

"On the oral, my evaluator was actually okay. The thing they liked was not that I knew all of the answers, but that I knew exactly where to find them. I had sticky notes all through the FAR AIM, and I knew where to go. "

(Gross says that same approach has helped her at Tech, where she frequently refers to herself as 'behind the curve' compared to her 'brilliant classmates.' She studies material intensely and never leaves a question unanswered in her own head. Those unanswered questions have a way of coming back to haunt.)

The third phase of her pilot's evaluation -- the flying test -- was, perhaps, the easiest. Gross had already logged more than the required 40 hours of flight time and was a fairly accomplished maintenance mechanic.

What did she obsess on? 

Details. Lots of details.

"You have to calculate a cross-country flight [a flight of more than 50 miles], using dead reckoning - no GPS or iPads -  to navigate," she said.

"You have to figure in the weather, the altitude, the headwinds, the tailwinds...and then, just to see if you know how to plan, they throw in a diversion [an unplanned destination]."

Gross doesn't remember much of that 1.5-hour flight  -- too nervous - but  she does remember how it ended.  "The instructor said 'Congratulations. You are now a licensed pilot.'"

A few weeks later, she turned 18.

The perks of having a pilot's license were not lost on Gross, by then a senior in high school. One of her pals at the airport - retired engineer and pilot Jim McDermott-  had given her full access to his Cesna, as long as she paid the insurance, performed the maintenance, and filled up the tank.

A sweeter deal than most teens get with the family car.

"So I remember once I flew to one of my away [softball]  games because it was so far away.  And another time, my mother wanted to go to New Jersey to see her father for Father's Day, but she was leaning against it because it would take 8 hours of driving each way.  I flew her there in 3 hours."

With her license out of the way, Gross was freed up to dive into another project that had her spending even more time at the airport: building an experimental plane with her mentor, Dave Rigotti.

The 700-pound, fabric-wrapped, tail wheel plane was completed right around the time she graduated.

"There was a lot of building, then taking things apart to re-drill a hole or realign a part. And then putting it back together again," she said.

"At the time I thought it was pretty tedious, but, when it was built, I could see that all of the work was worth it. It's a beautiful plane. And it was important. You really can't rush something like that. You have to get every component just right."

Sounds just like an engineer to us, so we had to ask: what do you plan to do with your Georgia Tech engineering education?

To this, Gross gave a ready smile and an answer that was clearly well thought-out:

"I'm the kind of person who sees six things, knows she can only do three, but chooses to do the six anyway," she said.

"So when I came to Georgia Tech, I had a choice between research, co-ops, and studying abroad. You can't do all of them, right? But that's what I decided to do."

Gross can already cross off two of those goals: she's completed one semester of her co-op, and she's done research work with three professors on subjects ranging from quad bots and quad copters to air traffic compliance.

A study-abroad semester will come in the fall of 2017.

And then?

" A lot of people have said I should become a pilot, but that's not the plan. Grad school will probably be next, but when I get out and work, I think I will get a day job as an engineer so I keep flying for fun."