Page 3 Profile: Kwasi Enin, student

Kwasi Enin, student

Stay in school, kids.

One young man has certainly taken that motto to heart. US student Kwasi Enin has become first person to successfully apply for places at all eight prestigious Ivy League universities. Enin, 17, applied to and was accepted by Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. The most selective colleges in the United States, Ivy League institutions are renowned for their long histories of impressive scholastic and athletic achievement. The Times Higher Education recently named six of them among the top 20 in its 2013-2014 world university rankings.

Wow - top of the class!

Enin, who attends William Floyd High School, a state-run school on Long Island, in New York state, is actually ranked 11th in his year of 647 students. Still, he has an academic test score that puts him in the top one per cent of students. What’s more, he competes as a shot putter for his school athletics team and plays the viola in the orchestra.

He’s quite the wunderkind. Pushy parents, no doubt?

Enin’s parents are both nurses who emigrated from Ghana to New York in the 1980s. Some of his uncles and cousins were also accepted to more than one Ivy League college but Enin was surprised at his own accomplishment. “I’ve always thought they were far better than me academically,” he said in an interview with Long Island’s Newsday. “By applying to all eight, I figured it would better the chances of getting into one,” he told the New York Daily News.

So where’s he going to go?

Enin has yet to make a final decision but at the moment he seems to leaning towards Yale, in Connecticut. “They seem to embody all the things I want in a college: the family, the wonderful education, the amazing diverse students and the financial aid as well.” Yale’s alumni include Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer prize winners and four US Presidents, including both George Bushes and Bill Clinton, who met Hillary Rodham (now Clinton) when they were students together there.

And does this whiz kid have political aspirations too?

Actually Enin hopes to pursue a career in medicine and says he aspires to be a cardiologist or a neurologist. Nancy Winkler, Enin’s guidance counsellor, told the New York Daily News, “I’ve never seen anything like it in my 15 years as a high-school counsellor. He’s going to be a leader in whatever he chooses.”