<p>[from the Charlotte Observer]</p>
<p>"School was canceled, yes, and an ice storm raged outside, but Irina Perjar has a very different reason she'll always remember Dec. 14, 2005. At lunchtime that day, she checked her e-mail and found she'd been accepted to Harvard University.</p>
<p>Then, the power went out.</p>
<p>"So I just sat there the rest of the day, (thinking) `I'm going to Harvard. Great,' " the Fred T. Foard valedictorian said with mock glumness.
Needless to say, the situation has brightened since then. Irina, 19, a native of impoverished Moldova, in Eastern Europe, is the first Harvard-bound Foard student counselors can remember. But the elite school hadn't always been in her plans.
At the N.C. Governor's School last summer, one of her friends told her, "You're one of those kids that's gonna be at Harvard next year." Irina wasn't so sure, but she took that as "kind of a dare" and decided to give it a try, in part because Harvard's early application process was nonbinding and could give her peace of mind by Christmas.
"Quite honestly, I expected to be flat-out rejected," she said. "I was not prepared for a yes-positive answer. So (when the news came in) I just sat there a while."
Even stranger was a financial aid package that meant it would cost less to go to Harvard than to Duke, the school she'd admired since arriving in the U.S. at age 9. "It was odd," she remembered. "I was like, `I can't believe this. Harvard is cheaper than Duke.' ........"</p>