Simon Ateba is Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa covering President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. government, UN, IMF, World Bank and other financial and international institutions in Washington and New York.
A Nigerian-American teen Ashley Adirika has been accepted into all eight Ivy League schools in the United States and seven other top-rated universities.
The 17-year-old was accepted into Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale, all at the same time.
Ms. Adirika could not contain her joy on Ivy Day, the day when the prestigious schools all announce their first-year admission decisions
“The tears just started to come out,” she told ABC News about realizing that she had quite a variety of Ivy League schools to choose from. “Like they started to flow out.”
“My siblings and I were just really excited, like screaming, jumping around. It was crazy,” she added.
Adirika, who attended Miami Beach High School, was also got accepted to seven other top-rated schools, including Stanford, Vanderbilt and Emory, but she picked Harvard, where she plans to major in government.
She told CNN that she “just decided to shoot my shot at all of them and see if it would land- And I had no idea that I would get accepted into all of them.”
CNN noted that since 2018, each Ivy League school has accepted less than 12 percent of its applicants, adding that this year, Yale accepted 4.5 percent, Columbia 3.7 percent and Harvard 3.2 percent, the lowest number in the university’s history.
She said she remembers “crying a lot and just being extremely surprised.”
She said before the college application process, “Yale was actually my first choice.” But after she did further research for what she wanted to do, “which is explorations in policy and social policy and things of that nature, Harvard just had a better program,” she said, adding that she wants to study how policies can ameliorate income disparities.
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