Most high schoolers apply to just a handful of post-secondary schools, hoping to score acceptance letters to a few.
Then there’s Micheal Brown.
The 17-year-old Texas student applied to 20 schools and got full-ride scholarships to every single one. It was an “Ivy League sweep” and then some.
Brown, a senior at Houston’s Lamar High School, was accepted to all eight U.S. Ivy League schools — from Harvard and Yale to Princeton and Brown -- and 12 others, including UC Berkeley, Tulane University, and USC. On top of it all, he racked up US$260,000 in scholarship offers.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” he told CTV News Channel on Tuesday. “Everything that I’ve put in -- all the hard work, all the late nights -- are finally paying off.”
As of February, Brown’s GPA was a 4.71, and his scores on U.S. standardized tests were in the top percentile: a whopping 1540 out of 1600 on the SAT and a 34 out of 36 on the ACT.
Though he hasn’t yet made his decision (he has until May 1 and plans to visit schools this month), his mother Berthinia Rutledge-Brown knows where she would go: Stanford all the way.
“I like California and I like the beach. The idea of living somewhere with cold weather is frightening to me,” she joked on CTV News Channel.
Brown is at least sure of what he wants to study. Inspired by former U.S. President Barack Obama, Brown will enroll in political science (and possibly opt for a second degree in economics) with an end goal of attending law school.
Of course, Brown isn’t the first to make the Ivy League sweep or receive acceptance letters from all schools to which he applied. The prevalence of social media has helped spread the success stories of teens like Brown and New Jersey high schooler Ifeoma White-Thorpe who made news last spring for completing the eight-school sweep.
But Brown’s feat is all the more noteworthy for a student from Lamar High School, where more than half of the students were considered “at risk” of dropping out, according to data from the 2016-2017 school year. Brown was encouraged by a program called the EMERGE Fellowship, which according to its website “empowers and prepares high-performing students from underserved communities” to attend and graduate from post-secondary education.
He credits his mother as another source of motivation. Rutledge-Brown works two jobs as a drug counsellor.
“If anything, my mom inspires me. I think I am a reflection of the lessons that I’ve learned from my mom, that I’ve learned from my family,” he said. “You never give up -- whether you’re writing papers or you’re running another club fair -- just don’t give up, because it’s worth it if you want to achieve your goal.”
Though she’d love for him to choose the sunny side of the country for the next steps in his life, Rutledge-Brown will embrace whatever choice her son makes.
“I want him to live his life and live his dreams and not be bound by my fears. I’m ready for him to go. I just want to support him in whatever his decision is,” she said. “I’m very proud of Micheal. He’s an inspiration to me. It makes me want to work even harder.”
