A New Jersey high school senior doesn’t have to worry about not attending a great college this year after being accepted by eight Ivy League schools.
Ifeoma White-Thorpe, a 17-year-old attending Morris Hills High School in Denville, N.J., not only got accepted into Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth and Princeton, but she also got into Stanford.
“I want to go into global health and study biology and so many of them have great research facilities, so I was like, ‘I might as well just shoot my shot and apply,'” Ifeoma says to WABC. “I was shaking, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, like this might be eight out of eight’ and I clicked it and it said ‘Congratulations’ and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness’ and then I was like, ‘What did I say?'”
Ifeoma won the national Selma speech and essay competition, where she focused on how long she has before she has to make an impact. She also serves as student government president and gets straight A’s in her advanced placement courses.
Ifeoma believes it was her “love for poetry and writing” that won over admissions personnel and now she faces the hard choice of where to attend school upon graduation in June, something her parents, Andre and Patricia White-Thorpe, are leaving up to her.
“At this point, none of the schools I’ve applied to have said they give merit scholarships,” says Ifeoma, who was accepted to Harvard during early action. “So I’m praying that they give me some more financial aid or some money, shout out to all of those schools, please give me something.”
