Black Excellence: 15 Year-Old Heads To Harvard After Getting Into 13 Colleges
Attending Harvard University is an accomplishment no matter your age, but especially when you’re only 15 years old. Saheela Ibraheem was accepted into the esteemed university before her Sweet 16 after getting into 13 other colleges, including California Institute of Technology, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Williams College, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University in St. Louis.
The over-achiever often excelled beyond her years. She skipped 6th grade at Conackamack Middle School in Piscataway, New Jersey, and 9th grade at the private Wardlaw-Hartridge School in Edison, New Jersey. Her accomplishments extend outside the classroom. She is a member of her school’s softball, soccer and swim teams and plays the trombone.
She credits her success to her Nigerian parents, who taught her subjects outside the school’s curriculum, and her own willingness to stay motivated: “I try my best in everything I do. Anyone who’s motivated can work wonders.”
Congrats, Saheela Ibraheem!
I’ve done it. I’ve finally made peace with the college application process. Yale or not, I can enjoy myself and find a great research lab and sing a cappella and dance on rooftops and meet daring, curious, incredible individuals. These things can be found everywhere; these people are everywhere. My intellect and my attitude are the sole predictors of my life’s value. Not a college decision. Not some arbitrary red stamp pounded by some stranger onto some file that unsuccessfully attempts to encompass my character and my achievements in the span of five pages. It’s ridiculous for me, or for anyone else, to interpret the events of the next few months as a measure of personal worth. It’s easy to try to quantify a human being. That’s why we love doing it so much. But every time, every single time, we will be wrong. People are not grades. People are not awards. People are not resumes. People are people. I am a person.
December 14th, you are not the apocalypse. You are the same December 14th as last year, and the year before.
