On Tuesday we celebrated #BlackGirlMagic after high school senior Ifeoma White-Thrope from New Jersey made a clean sweep in her college applications and was accepted into all eight Ivy League schools and Stanford, for good measure. Well, today, I’m bringing you some #BlackBoyJoy, after a set of Ohio quadruplets were all accepted into Yale and Harvard—among other impressive potential college destinations—leaving the young men with some big choices.
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“We’re still in shock, honestly,” Aaron Wade told the Washington Post. “I don’t think it has sunk in yet.”
According to the Post, it was Aaron’s brother Nick who found out the good news on his applications first, late one afternoon during track practice last week. The three other brothers were also on the track team, so Aaron quickly found out his fate next from the locker room. Nigel, who was stretching out, checked out his applications after his brothers told him to. The last one who needed convincing was Zach, who was quite content to wait the 20 minutes until practice ended, but his brothers would have none of it.
“It would have taken like 20 more minutes,” Zach said, revealing that his brothers checked for him. “But they couldn’t wait that long.”
“Honestly, to have one child from a family be accepted to a school like this is amazing,” Zach added. “But for all four to be accepted—I just don’t, I don’t know how it happened.”
“I just felt blessed at that moment,” Nigel said. “It was an unreal feeling, I guess.”
Besides the two Ivies, Nick got accepted into Duke, Georgetown and Stanford. Aaron secured entry into Stanford, too. Nigel got accepted into Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt, and Zach got an acceptance letter from Cornell.
“The outcome has shocked us,” Aaron said. “We didn’t go into this thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to apply to all these schools and get into all of them.’ It wasn’t so much about the prestige or so much about the name as it was—it was important that we each find a school where we think that we’ll thrive, and where we think that we’ll contribute.”
The boys are not sure what school they’ll be choosing yet, but acknowledged that financial aid is going to be a huge decision.
Their father, Darrin Wade, who works for General Electric, and their mother, Kim, a school principal, have saved some money toward their sons’ educations, but funding four sets of college tuition for four years is nothing to sneeze at.
“I remember they were doing an ultrasound and they said, ‘Mr. Wade, you better sit down.’ I said, ‘What’s going on?’ They said, ‘There’s not two. There’s four,’” Darrin Wade said, recounting how it was initially thought that the couple would be having twins. “It was really at that point in time that I tried to figure out how we’re going to pay for school.”
It is also not clear if the brothers will stay together for college or start to go their separate ways, since each of them has very distinct goals. Nick wants to double-major in international relations and economics. Zach is looking into engineering. Nigel has his eyes set on neuroscience, and Aaron wants to study computer science and cognitive science.
“We really don’t know. We still have to make those decisions,” Nick said. “We’re just shocked. We still don’t believe that we got in.”
Read more at the Washington Post.
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