Texas teen accepted to 20 top universities, offered full rides to all of them


Micheal Brown's problem is a pretty good one to have: The Houston high school senior has been accepted to 20 of the best universities in the country, plus offered full-ride scholarships to each one of them, and he must now decide where to spend the next four years.
"It's something I'm proud of because I see my hard work paying off, determination paying off, sacrifices paying off," Brown, 17, told CNN. His top choices as of now are Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Georgetown, and Vanderbilt, and Brown said he's going to go on tours of several schools before making his final choice on May 1.
Brown attends Mirabeau B. Lamar High School, and is active in debate, mock trial, and student government. He said he became interested in politics after the election of former President Barack Obama, and has volunteered with different campaigns. Brown would like to major in political science, with the possibility of adding on a second degree in economics, and he has a lot of role models already in college; through organizations like Emerge Fellowship and QuestBridge, he's become friends with other students from low-income communities who are now at Ivy League schools. "For me, it's important to highlight that I'm not the only student of color who is achieving," he told CNN.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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