Brittany Stinson
Brittany Stinson
Stinson shared her admissions essay with Business Insider last week, and the post went viral.
She explained that she was initially taken back by all of the attention after she got into Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Cornell, as well as the incredibly competitive non-Ivy, Stanford.
"I'm a shy person," she told Business Insider.
In addition to the Ivies and Stanford, she was accepted to Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, New York University, and Boston University.
Stinson's qualifications for those acceptances go far beyond an impressive admissions essay.
She's the valedictorian of her Concord High School class, and has been first in her class every year in high school. Her weighted GPA is a 4.9, and un-weighted it's a 4.0.
Stinson has been chasing dreams of the Ivy League as long as she can remember. "I've always thought about the Ivy route; I've had it in the back of my mind," she explained.
She also speaks Portuguese fluently, a trait she gained from her Brazilian-born mother. She also speaks Spanish proficiently. And she has taken eight Advanced Placement courses over the course of her high school career. She gravitates toward the field of science the most.
Brittany Stinson.
Brittany Stinson.
As for that admission essay she wrote, Stinson explained that she focused on staying true to herself.
"I just did something that was me," she said. "I knew I was capable of weaving in humor into the essay, and I knew that with kids that have similar extracurriculars and scores you need to stand out when it comes to the essay."