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[WaPo] She’s a first-generation college student with her pick of 5 Ivy League schools

June 23, 2015

 

In this Aug. 30, 2012, file photo, a tour group walks through the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. School officials said Wednesday, June 3, 2015, that Harvard Business School graduate and prominent Wall Street investor John Paulson donated $400 million to the school, its biggest gift in its history. Harvard said the endowment will support the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which will be renamed the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in his honor. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola

In this Aug. 30, 2012, file photo, a tour group walks through the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

[THE WASHINGTON POST] — Brandi Moore insists she really is normal. She didn’t put on airs when she applied to more than a dozen colleges. She told Columbia University that she watched “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Her Common Application essay was about how she went to a climate change rally and was “surrounded by a bunch of hippies.”

“It was certainly a reflection of myself — laid back and humorous,” Moore said.

It just so happened that five schools from the Ivy League — a term she was unfamiliar with five years ago — picked her. She viewed the college application process less as a competition and more as a match-making process. So the way she sees it, Harvard found her and she found Harvard, where she will shoulder a small portion of the cost of her schooling thanks to scholarships and financial aid. (She was courted, too, by Cornell, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, and eight other schools.) [READ MORE]