Ifeoma White-Thorpe Is the Amazing Teen Who Got Into All 8 Ivy League Colleges, and Stanford
(Facebook/The National Liberty Museum)
Ifeoma White-Thorpe just pulled off the academic equivalent of bowling a perfect game, because she just did what only a handful of kids before her have ever done, and she got accepted to all eight Ivy League schools. (And Stanford.)
White-Thorpe is a 17-year-old senior at Morris Hills High School in Rockaway, New Jersey, where she’s the president of the student body. She has the AP-loaded schedule and spectacular grades anyone would expect of a top-tier college applicant, but she says that what she thinks set her apart was her writing and poetry.
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Never underestimate the importance of writing when it comes to college applications. The essay is one of the most, if not the most, important part of a college application, and White-Thorpe has been writing poetry and winning essay contests since kindergarten. She even won first place and a $5,000 scholarship in the National Liberty Museum’s Selma Speech and Essay Contest.
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”I want to go into global health and study biology and so many of them have great research facilities, so I was like, I might as well just shoot my shot and apply,” White-Thorpe said to ABC 7. ”I got into Harvard early action so I figured I’ll just go there, so then I got into all the others and I was like, wait now I don’t know where I want to go.”
She applied Early Action to Harvard and was accepted–Early Action means you apply early, but it’s not binding and you can still change your mind later. So when the other acceptances started coming in, White-Thorpe realized she’d have a big decision to make. (Early admissions are generally considered more difficult, because the strongest applicants apply early, so it’s a tougher pool to compete in. Early applicants can be accepted, rejected, or moved to the regular applicant pool. The kids who are accepted early are the very most impressive, the ones where the admissions staff looks at the application and goes, “Oh, we don’t need to see who’s in the regular applicant pool. We know we want this kid.”)
White-Thorpe’s parents say the final decision is completely up to her. She says she’s waiting to see which school offers her the best financial aid package. None of the Ivies offers merit-based scholarships, but they all have need-blind admissions. In 2016 and 2015 two other students were accepted to all eight Ivies, and they both picked Harvard.
