The Rhoce Island College campus has been high school and college for Elizabeth Codd of Barrington.

Journal / Kathy Borchers

For the last seven years, Rhode Island College has been a high school, college and second home for Elizabeth Codd, of Barrington. On Saturday morning, Liz, who is 18, will be among the 1,221 graduates receiving a bachelor’s degree.

A gifted violinist and mathematician, Liz is the second-youngest student to graduate in the 155-year-history of the public college. She is doing so with the highest academic honors.

Liz took her first RIC course, college biology, when she was 11. She had a math tutor at home and took a few classes each year at RIC until three years ago, when she started taking a full college course load.

“This, basically, is high school for me,” she said. “I have really enjoyed it. I think some of the teachers here at Rhode Island College are the best of any institution, anywhere.”

Liz will graduate summa cum laude in mathematics, with a nearly straight-A average and a love of music that transcends her interest in advanced calculus. This fall, Liz will enter the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass. She is already focused on her next goal — a degree in music performance.

Her practical side pushed her to major in math — a useful discipline that could lead to good jobs in business or high-tech. But, she says, her dream of pursuing music was nurtured at RIC, where she played with the symphony orchestra and chamber orchestra.

“It’s really hard to make a living as a musician,” she said. “But I am leaning toward music. It’s always been special to me.”

Her music professor and mentor, John Sumerlin, called Liz’s talent “extraordinary” and said she easily falls into the top strata of musicians he has taught during his 35-year career.

Sumerlin began working with Codd when she was 15.

“Two parallel things set her apart from her age group,” Sumerlin said. “She has an extraordinarily well-developed sense of intonation. People who study music work very hard at it and hope to be good at it. She’s extremely good at it.” Intonation helps violinists play notes exactly in tune, Sumerlin said, and is crucial for musicians.

“The other thing comes from a mathematical component,” he said. “She’s a very quick study and she has the ability to retain patterns to a very amazing degree.”

Sumerlin encouraged Liz to attend the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado for two summers, experiences he believes gave her the confidence to pursue music as a career.

“I felt it was very important for her to experience an environment where there were people of similar ability surrounding her,” he said. “Here, she was such a star among us and so far ahead of most of the other string players. She tends to be extremely self-critical and I wanted her to throw her gift into perspective.”

When Liz returned from the first summer, Sumerlin noticed a difference. “I think it was not so difficult for her to see she was doing pretty well,” he said.

Liz, an only child, inherited her modesty from her mother, Mary Codd, a sculptor and 3-D Web designer, whose flexible work schedule permitted her to oversee her daughter’s unique education. Codd and her husband, electrical engineer John Giglio, decided to pull Liz out of Barrington’s Hampton Meadows School toward the end of fourth grade, when it became clear the school could not offer math advanced enough to challenge the 9-year-old.

“We knew Liz was academically accelerated, and what they were going to do with the class wouldn’t meet her needs,” Codd said. From an early age, her daughter gravitated toward numbers. She read at 3½ and began violin lessons at 4½, details her mother offers only when asked.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” she said. “I’m pretty amazed at what she can do.”

Codd said she was intimidated at the thought of home-schooling her daughter, but found support on the Internet, networking with the families of other gifted children. Their first move was to hire a doctoral candidate from Brown University to tutor Liz in math. The next year, Barrington High School allowed Liz to take a chemistry class — a positive experience, her mother says.

The year Liz should have been in sixth grade, she took her first class at RIC. Codd turned to RIC because of its emphasis on teaching and the faculty’s willingness to embrace her child. RIC had similarly welcomed a couple of other young, gifted students who quickly became Liz’s campus friends.

“The important thing was to keep her learning and growing and engaged at her level of ability and, socially, for her to be with other kids,” Codd said.

This summer, Liz says she will work as a math tutor and has already been hired to play the violin at weddings. “I have to earn money for college, and Cambridge is a really expensive place to live,” she said.

On Saturday, her parents, grandparents from Florida and a clutch of relatives from Massachusetts will be in the audience to celebrate this milestone.

Her mother says she’s proud of all her daughter has accomplished, particularly her decision to study music.

“When you love something that much, you should do it,” her mother said.

jjordan@projo.com