Nigerian-American student bags $4m scholarship

A 17-year-old Nigerian-American girl, Ashley Adirika, has won a $4 million scholarship to study at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Adirika was able to apply to US Ivy League universities because of her exceptional academic record.

After completing her studies at Miami Beach Senior High School in Florida, Ashley Adirika had always desired to enroll in an Ivy League university.

When she opened her computer to check all her applications on Ivy Day, she was amazed to find out that all the Ivy League universities accepted and offered a scholarship, according to Scholarship Region news.

The schools included Brown University, Columbia University, Dartmouth University, Harvard University, Penn University, Princeton University, and Yale University.

Revealing her wild excitement, Adirika also said she received acceptance letters from Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Emory University.

“I just decided to shoot my shot at all of them and see if it would land. And I had no idea I would get accepted into all of them. On Ivy Day, I remember crying a lot and just being extremely surprised,” Ashely told CNN.

According to reports, the likelihood of being admitted to one of the elite universities ranges between three and eight percent.

According to CNN, since 2018, the US most exclusive schools have accepted less than 12% of their applicants. In 2022, Yale took 4.5%, Columbia welcomed 3.7%, and Harvard greeted just 3.2% of its future pupils, the smallest number ever in the university’s history.

Adirika is well-known for her exceptional academic performance as well as her prowess in speech and debate.

She said, “I’m someone who loves to learn new things, and so debate gave me that opportunity,”.

“But more than anything, it just gave me the platform to talk about things that I believed in and talk about things that were important to me. And so that is something that I am just forever indebted to Carol City for introducing me to that platform.”

Starting in middle school, her skills were exemplary of what the future held in store for her.

“Everybody knew Ashley because of how smart she was,” Carol City Middle School teacher Bess Rodriguez shared.

Rodriguez added, “She had test scores through the roof; she’s involved in all different activities. So I recruited her, and she had never debated before,”.