Congrats to this student! He sounds like a very interesting and accomplished young man!
“… including being clueless in U.S. history classes at school.” There you go, people, that’s what the adcoms want to see! (jk)
Congrats to this young man!
Every few years you read about a fairly recent immigrant who gets into a bunch of elite schools. All these kids have one thing in common: educated and/or academically ambitious parents who push their kids to discover and take advantage of the many educational resources available to them.
While admirable, their accomplishments, to me, aren’t as inspiring as those of kids who succeed despite the bad school, the parents who can’t help/inspire, and the no-opportunities neighborhoods they live in.
Kudos to the Ethiopian kid who gets into Stanford (or wherever) – but it’s not necessarily shocking if his/her parents were doctors back in Ethiopia.
What is Long Island putting in the water? This is two years in a row!
It’s impressive (though still kind of meaningless since you can only attend one college), but keep in mind that there are kids who get in to all of HYPS (and everywhere else that they applied) but not all the Ivies because they didn’t feel there was a reason to apply to all 8 Ivies. (It may just be me, but the “apply to all 8 Ivies” thing seems to be done mostly in the Northeast with maybe a few kids in CA doing that as well).
I’d say that each year, there are probably about 10-20 kids who get in to all 4 of HYPS.
Katliamom, I didn’t see anything in the article that this student had parents who are doctors or a sense of great privilege. In fact, the high school this young many attends is 99% minority and is public. This particular student also had to adjust to a radically different culture at age 8.
Purpletitan, I agree with you that many tippy top candidates do not apply to all 8 Ivies (I mean these schools are quite different). Even so, this young man’s accomplishments are quite impressive.
More information:
So, this is a family with FIVE children and the parents are not doctors. The article also states that from age 8 through 8th grade, the family lived in Queens.
And there’s this:
Congrats to this young man. He sure is a role model to his siblings and others.
My reference to doctors was hypothetical, as was the Ethiopia reference since this young man is from Nigeria. But more to the point, the article says they were comfortable in Nigeria but came here for greater educational opportunities. Which is exactly my point: these kids do so well because of the culture/aspirations in their own families. A child like this, despite (or maybe precisely because of) his immigrant status is already miles ahead of the average school kid in his American milieu.
Though these stories are nice, my stomach churns at the idea of someone putting Dartmouth and Columbia on the same list. It’s so clear what they cared about.
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@katliamom - what these immigrant kids have is appreciation for the abundance of resources available to them. They are not miles ahead - they simply don’t take what they have for granted.
^^ the same thing thousands of other applicants want: an education at an elite university. I don’t see a problem with that.
@singermom4, and where do you think these kids learned to appreciate these resources? Frankly, it starts at home. And that was my point.
I agree with Katliamom, Purple Titan and especially CaliCash. I commend this young fellow but I am searching for a point; why apply to all Ivies to the exclusion of other fine colleges? I think we all know the answer, but still, as CaliCash said…Columbia AND Dartmouth? Even 30 years ago a recruiter I met with told me those two places were too different to be on any single list. Young Mr. Ekeh appears to illustrate another example of USNWR prestige-searching run amok.
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There are two ways to look at such story:
- It is incredibly easy to find it a compelling story and find it a remarkable journey of achievement. The young man surely did everything he could and did it well.
2, It is equally easy to be cynical about a family playing its cards very well, and it is incredibly easy to note that the schools listed continue to show preferences to immigrants to fill their racial distribution requirements. And they ALL do it.
The beauty of the two ways to look at it? They are both correct! My own take on such stories? Just as the one last year, I think that the kid will come to REGRET having allowed adults in his life to allow their ego trip to be plastered all over the news. The fact that such story is yielding thousands of google links and is massively repeated by tons of two-cents-worth “journalists” speak volumes about 24/7 sensationalist media.
Inasmuch as this young man exhibits plenty of merits, I would be more impressed by someone from Chicago making it to Northwestern in the ED round or someone for South Carolina making it to Emory or Vanderbilt. There are plenty of students who do NOT feel the need to engage in trophy hunting to a level that reaches the obscene.
And plenty of students who have the presence of mind and the right set of adults in their life to understand that placing your life on a tee will results in many kudos or … swings of the driver of the bat.
All in all, there are more wrongs that rights in this story being … published. The poor guy will find that out wherever he matriculates!
Just for the record, he also was accepted at Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Stony Brook University and Vanderbilt University.
Now, I would be the first person who is not into applying to all 8 Ivies and am an advocate for finding the best fit college and individualizing the process to the max. And yes, the Ivies are all quite different. That said, I don’t begrudge this kid for having the list he had. I imagine given his immigrant background and his parents’ hopes for their kid to get a good education in the US, they perceived that applying to all the Ivies were that ticket. They knew of these schools for all the reasons we know…prestige, rankings, etc. He applied to other schools too. Even if I would not pick such a list of schools, he did and so what.
I see his applying to all the Ivys as a reflection of the fact that neither he nor his parents know much about colleges. He applied to the ones he’d heard of. This is consistent with his goal of becoming a neurosurgeon in order to cure Alzheimer’s disease. He’s young. I’m happy for him and wish him all the best.
He seems like a great kid who will use his education well. I don’t begrudge his success. However, the college admissions system itself does does bug me. In recent years, have we ever seen a native-born, non-URM getting into all the Ivies? Who would such a student have to do or be, given we’ve seen here on CC some super exceptional kids getting lots of rejections from the very schools that admitted him? Also, his essay as he described it in the video, sounds like the kind the adcoms always tell us they see thousands of–the standard immigrant persistence in struggle essay, combined with a little of the standard “the relative I most admire” essay. Clearly, we can’t read it, but it does make you question the truthfulness of what the public is told about how decisions are made. We are led to believe the essay is pretty important, all other things being up to par.
He’s Nigerian, what did you all expect?
When I studied there, I met the most abitious kids I’ve ever seen. Nigerian culture greatly values not only education, but success and representation 