'Very Surreal:' New Jersey Student Earns Full Ride To All 8 Ivy League Schools
NORTH BERGEN, N.J. (CBSNewYork) – It's that stressful time of year for high school seniors as they await their college acceptance letters.
But the only stress for one New Jersey student is deciding which Ivy League school to go to.
As CBS2's Cindy Hsu reported, Anna Rezk is very modest, but she just made history at High Technical High School in North Bergen as the first student to be accepted into all eight Ivys on full ride scholarships.
"It was very surprising and very surreal at the same time, because I didn't actually think it was real," she told Hsu.
But Pezk put in the work – she has 5.63 grade point average, thanks to all the advanced placement classes she took, and scored a 1570 out of 1600 on her SATs.
Her parents emigrated from Egypt and her father died from pancreatic cancer when she was just 13. So now, she wants to find a cure.
"She's just dedicated to doing what she can to find a cure for cancer and doing it so people don't have to go through what she went through," science teacher Bill Goold said.
"He was always laughing, always bragging about me. So my mom's kind of super quiet, but he'd be the one kind of telling all his friends, 'Oh my kid is smarter than yours,' or whatever," said Rezk.
Her twin brother, John, said Anna became like a second mother.
"Close to when our father passed away, my mom started working a lot more overtime hours and stuff like that. So Anna was usually the one at home. At the same time when she was studying, she was cooking for us," he said. "She was always like the mediator and always taking care of us, making sure we were on track."
Rezk came to tears talking about her dad and said she has an idea of what her father is doing right now.
"I think he's proud, probably bragging to other angels or something, like, 'I knew,'" she said.
As she works on making a tough decision on which college she'll attend, she's also still working hard at school. The moment the interview wrapped up, she was off to a calculus test.
She hasn't decided where she'll go to school yet, but said right now it's between Princeton and Brown.
