The student who worked among Columbia PhDs at just 16 and got into all 8 Ivies made her college decision
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She will be attending Harvard University next fall.
"I feel a sense of relief but also a little sad that I had to reject the other 11," Uwamanzu-Nna told Newsday.
In addition to all of the Ivies, she was accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and New York University.
Uwamanzu-Nna chose Harvard, in part, due to its strength in STEM - an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math - subjects, according to Newsday.
She has a demonstrated interest in science and, at 16, was the youngest researcher in a Columbia University lab, working among PhD and master's students in summer 2015.
Her persistence, started by a high school civil-engineering research project, led her to Columbia's lab.
Uwamanzu-Nna said that she wanted to learn about fluid mechanics by way of measuring the strength of samples, but her school didn't have the proper high-tech apparatus for such work.
"I had to jury-rig this weird thing and use bench weights from my school's weight room to measure the strength of samples," she told Business Insider in a previous interview.
After an initial rejection for a lab position at Columbia between her sophomore and junior years, Uwamanzu-Nna kept in touch with a researcher and was eventually accepted to work there the following summer.
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"The head researcher at Columbia was very impressed by my tenacity, by my persistence, and by the fact that I was 16 and doing cement and concrete research," she said.
She believes that spirit was the driving force behind her college acceptances.
"As a high schooler, what really explains my recent accomplishment is finding something I am passionate about," she said, "and not being afraid of stepping outside of my comfort zone."