Meet the Boy who Got into all 8 Ivy League Universities and Turned Them All Down
With news surrounding numerous students being accepted into Ivy League universities, and one girl in particular achieving the seemingly impossible and getting accepted into all 8, comes the tale of the boy who bucked the trend; having gained acceptance into all 8 Ivy League schools, he turned them ALL down.
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Alexander Roman, son of Mexican immigrants, was one of 7 students who was accepted into all 8 Ivy League institutions back in 2015. While 4 of them chose Harvard and 1 Yale, Alexander Roman inexplicably turned them all down and instead chose the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). The atmosphere at MIT, with everyone so well connected, as well as its comparative small size and their distinguished STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields, ultimately sealed the deal for young Alexander.
Image via Daderot at English WikipediaTurning down an Ivy League School may seem crazy to any average student, but Alexander was unfazed. While he did acknowledge that giving up the prestige and the moniker of an Ivy league education wasn’t easy, he emphasises choosing a college is about choosing the place that you feel you can become the best person you can be at the end of your journey, which for him, was MIT.Ivy League schools are generally viewed as some of the most prestigious, and are ranked among the best universities worldwide. The eight institutions that comprise the Ivy League are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.
Image via returnofkings.comIn recent years, Ivy League schools still chart extremely high in many rankings, with U.S. News naming a member of the Ivy League as the best national university in each of the past seventeen years.The Top 5: Global University Employability Rankings listed MIT as number two overall, and the only behind ANOTHER non-Ivy League university, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Of course, Harvard was no slouch by any stretch of the imagination, bagging the bronze in third place. In the end, it does beg the question as to how important an institution’s name and ranking is, versus how compatible a student is with their chosen institution.
