Ashley Adirika, a 17-year-old teen from Miami, Florida, has made history after getting accepted to all the 8 Ivy League schools. She has also received acceptance letters from many other prestigious universities.
On Ivy Day, or the day each Ivy League school announces who has been admitted to their upcoming freshman class, Adirika saw her dreams come true. She received acceptance letters from all of them: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale.Ashley, whose mother immigrated to the United States three decades ago, was with her family including her four siblings when she found out about the great news.
"I 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," she told CNN. "On Ivy Day, I remember crying a lot and just being extremely surprised."
Ashley made history as she became one of the very few students to be admitted to Ivy League schools. This year, Yale only took 4.5% of its applicants, Columbia only accepted 3.7%, and Harvard had its lowest admission in class with only 3.2%. Ashley also received acceptance letters from 7 other prestigious schools such as Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Emory.
Ashley recently graduated from Miami Beach Senior High School, where she served as the student council president and was a member of the debate team. Since then, she has always been interested in how the government and its policies work and what she can do to help fix economic disparities in communities.
Ashley took those into consideration when choosing the school she would attend. She was initially deciding between Harvard and Yale, but she ultimately chose Harvard where she plans to major in government. She also hopes to join the debate team at Harvard.
"I am really passionate about policy and using policy to empower communities. And so in the short term, for me, that looks like becoming a lawyer," she says. "But in the long term, I want to use that as a platform to do work in policy."
Moreover, Ashley has already started Our Story Our Worth, an organization that works with girls and young women to provide them with mentorship and sisterhood. It currently serves the community in Miami and she hopes to expand it worldwide.
