The Teen Who Got Into All 8 Ivy League Schools

The Ivy League universities are notoriously hard to get into, but that didn’t stop one New Yorker from applying to all eight. Long shot, right? Apparently not.

August Uwamanzu-Nna from Long Island, New York was accepted to the eight Ivy League schools— Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale — as well as her four backups: New York University, Johns Hopkins University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Yes, you read that right. MIT is one of her safety schools.)

“I’m still quite unsure what school I’m going to attend, but I know attending any of them would be such a great honor,” Uwamanzu-Nna told News 12 Long Island.

The 17-year-old valedictorian has a weighted 101.6 GPA (because 4.0 scales are so passé) and credits her success to family and teachers.

“The teachers make sure our potential is met and that we have done everything in our abilities to achieve success,” she said.

She currently attends Elmont Memorial High school in Long Island, which had another student, Harold Ekeh, also accepted to all the Ivy’s last year and ultimately opted for Yale University. Uwamanzu-Nna plans to visit each of the schools this month to see which one she’ll say “yes” to by the May 1 commitment deadline. (Can we join her on this road trip?)

Ivy League schools don’t offer merit scholarships but use factors like family income, assets and size to determine each student’s need for financial assistance. There are other colleges who charge more in yearly tuition than Ivy League schools, but tuition is still pretty expensive. The priciest choice at the moment (in terms of total tuition and fees for a year) is Columbia University with a $51,008 price tag, and the cheapest (if you can call the equivalent of a sizable down payment on a house “cheap”) is Princeton at $43,450.

No matter which school students decide to attend, cost is certainly an important factor. More than 43 million Americans have student loan debt, many of whom carry debt loads that will take years to pay off. While student loans can do good things for your credit scores, they can also have a major negative impact on grads’ credit if they miss payments or default. You can see how your student loans are impacting your credit scores for free on Credit.com.

Uwamanzu-Nna is not the only high achiever of the year. Delaware high school senior Brittany Stinson got into five Ivies, evidently on the strength of one of her essays, in which she took readers on a self-actualizing journey through Costco. Here’s a sample (get it?):

Overcome with wonder, I wanted to touch and taste, to stick my head into industrialized freezers, to explore every crevice. I was a conquistador, but rather than searching the land for El Dorado, I scoured aisles for free samples.

We know how you feel, Brittany. Journalists are drawn to free food like no one else.