The professional training she received during this period was the training available to a working child in the entertainment industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s: on-set experience, commercial work, the accumulated knowledge of how to be in front of a camera and how to take direction and how to read a room. She took acting classes when she could, with adult students, which suggests both a preference for the company of people whose professional development matched her own functional maturity and a practical understanding that the skills she was building were adult professional skills.
The Professional Children’s School, where she studied during the New York years, had a specific organizational logic: it accommodated professional schedules, moved around absences, provided the education that was legally required while not treating it as the primary organizing principle of the student’s week. This is a practical arrangement, and it produces a practical understanding of what school is and what work is. For students at the Professional Children’s School, the hierarchy of the two is clearer than it is for students in conventional schools. The school is the accommodation; the work is the point.
She graduated from high school a year early, from the small private school she eventually settled on in Los Angeles. The early graduation is consistent with the profile of a student who had been operating on an accelerated timeline in every other dimension of her life — who had been working professionally for seven years by the time she graduated, who had lived in Florida and New York and Los Angeles, who had booked commercials and television guest roles and a feature film before most of her nominal peers had finished their first summer job.