Getting into one Ivy League school is impressive enough, but that didn't stop one Long Island teenager from applying to -- and getting accepted by -- all eight.
Kwasi Enin, 17, a senior at William Floyd High School in Mastic, N.Y., beat the almost impossible odds.
"By applying to all eight, I figured it would better the chances of getting into one," he told the New York Daily News.
Instead he opened acceptance letters from all eight -- Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale. His acceptance into Harvard last week sealed the deal.
The acceptance rate for upcoming freshmen at these elite schools ranges from 5.9 percent at Harvard to 14 percent at Cornell.
"I've never seen anything like it in my 15 years as a high school counselor," said Nancy Winkler, Enin's guidance counselor. "He's going to be a leader in whatever he chooses."
Enin said he's currently interested in a life of medicine.
"I'm thinking of being a cardiologist or neurologist," he said.
The son of immigrant nurses from Ghana, Enin ranks No. 11 in a class of 647 seniors, putting him in the top 2 percentile of his class. His SAT score was 2,250 out of 2,400 points and he will have taken 11 Advanced Placement courses by the time he graduates. More than book smart, he's a musician who sings in the school's a capella group and volunteers at Stony Brook University Hospital's radiology department.
Enin has "a lot of things in his favor," college admissions expert Katherine Cohen, CEO and founder of the consulting firm IvyWise, told USA Today. The fact that he's a boy, for one thing, as schools are looking for more men to even out the playing field, since last year 57 percent of college students were girls, Cohen said.
This future physician is also a first-generation American from Ghana, which helps him jump off the page amid thousands of applications, she added.
Financial aid will play a big role in Enin's decision-making process. So far Princeton has been the most generous, but he has yet to get offers from Columbia, Cornell or Harvard. He has until May 1 to decide.
