Long Island High School Senior Weighing Acceptance Letters from All 8 Ivy League Schools
ByKwasi Enin is a 17-year-old high school student in Long Island who rolled the educational equivalent to a Yahtzee.
Only instead of a five-of-a-kind, Enin has been accepted to all eight Ivy league schools as well as Duke, Stony Brook University, SUNY Geneseo and Binghamton University. He told Newsday he never could have imagined having to choose between Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn and Yale.
A Floyd High School senior in the 99th percentile of SAT scores, Enin said he was hoping for "two or three" to accept him, which would have made his decision much simpler. Now, he will have to wait on eight (or more) different financial aid packages to help his decision.
His academic resume is not just a high GPA and good SAT scores. Enin throws shot put, sings baritone, plays the viola and has already scored highly on several Advanced Placement tests.
Kwasi's father Ebenezer said he and his wife raised both his children to reach as high as they possibly could and now Enin wants to study medicine.
"We are very proud of him," Ebenezer Enin told Newsday. "He's an amazing kid. He's very humble. He's been trained to be a high achiever right from when he was a kid. We have been encouraging him to be an all-around student. So far, he has proved himself."
Enin comes from a family where several relatives were accepted to Ivy League schools, but Kwasi had never believed he would get to choose between all eight.
"I've never heard of someone getting all eight," he said. "I was like - 'this can't be happening.'"
He had serious reservations about his impending letter from Harvard, a school that accepts 5.9 percent of its applicants.
"It has to be the one to reject me," he said before receiving the acceptance letter. "They're Harvard."
Barbara Butler, the principal of the school Enin attended for six years, said none of the administrators were surprised, but all were very proud.
"You could see the potential that Kwasi had back then and to see it all come together is truly spectacular," she told Newsday. "He has it all together - he's extremely intelligent, hardworking, well-rounded and humble."