The 2011-2012 incoming class at the number one ranking undergraduate college school just got a little more diversified. The driving force behind the dynamics? Fifteen-year-old Saheela Ibraheem.
As the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Ibraheem will enter the freshman class as one of the youngest students at the Ivy League school, as she heads to Harvard University this for the 2011-2012 academic year.
The teen from New Jersey will be a member of Harvard University’s class of 2015, which BET.com previously reported admitted 11.8 African-American students for the 2011-2012 academic year – a possible record for the school.
After excelling at a very young age, being a part of a select group of students is nothing new to Ibraheem. She skipped sixth grade and after no longer feeling challenged by public schools, she enrolled at Wardlaw-Hartridge School -- a 420-student college preparatory day school in Edison, New Jersey. She bypassed freshman year and enrolled as a 10th grader.
"I was so excited. I got into college!" she exclaimed after receiving her first acceptance letter from California Institute of Technology reported New Jersey Online. Shortly after receiving that piece of mail, letters started to pile in from Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell, Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Williams College, Stanford, University of North Carolina at ChapelHill, University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis.
Ibraheem was admitted into all but one school to which she applied—Yale University. She says she’s not sure why they turned her down, but her family suspects it might have been her age.
Ibraheem isn’t sure of her major, but expects it will likelybe either neurobiology or neuroscience and she plans to become a research scientist who studies the brain.
Yale’s loss is definitely Harvard’s gain.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Tuesday, May 10th 2011 at 1:19PM
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