Ivy league schools rarely accept more than 14 percent of applicants.
A 17-year old Long Island student is likely smarter than you'll ever be. High school senior Harold Ekeh was just accepted into all eight Ivy League schools. Each of those schools reject more than 86 percent of applicants making getting into all eight a statistical anomaly.
Ekeh has a grade-point average of 100.5 percent, an SAT score of 2270 and was a semifinalist for the national Intel Science Talent Search. He can choose his own destiny at the most elite institutions in the country, between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania.
He hasn't made up his mind but might choose Yale, where Kwasi Enin, who also got accepted to all of the the Ivies last year, now attends. Ekeh moved to New York from Nigeria at age 8 and used the challenges he braved while “coming to America” as the basis of his application essays.
“It was very difficult to adjust . . . I spoke English but with a very heavy accent. It was like, ‘What is this kid saying?’ ” he said.
Ekeh hopes to become a neurosurgeon to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. His grandma was diagnosed with the disease, fueling his passion for science, he said. He was also accepted into the other five schools: MIT, NYU, Johns Hopkins University, Stony Brook University and Vanderbilt University (NBD).
“Never would I have expected to get into all 13 schools. I just wanted to increase my chances of getting into one of them,” he said. “I don’t see it as an accomplishment for me. I see it as an accomplishment for my community. I hope it inspires the younger generation."
Instead of turning up when he learned of his Ivy sweep last Tuesday, he celebrated by going to Bible study and then to Chipotle. I hope he got extra guac; he definitely earned it.
[via NY Post]
