Overall, the 17-year-old straight A senior at Elmont Memorial High School in suburban Elmont, Long Island, who boasts a grade-point average of 100.55% and a SAT score of 2270, was accepted at all 13 schools he applied to.
Besides Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, Ekeh was also accepted into MIT, John Hopkins, Vanderbilt, New York University, and SUNY Stony Brook.
He told CNN Money, “I am leaning toward Yale. I competed at Yale for Model UN and I like the passion people at Yale had.”
But despite “leaning toward Yale,” he said he would be visiting all the schools before making a final choice.
The Nassau County whiz kid emigrated to the U.S. with his Nigerian parents when he was only eight years old. His success story follows the example of fellow West African, the Ghanaian whiz kid, Kwasi Enin, 18, from Mastic Beach, N.Y., who also chose Yale after making a clean sweep of all eight Ivy League schools last year.
Ekeh said his choice of Yale was influenced by Yale students he made friends with and who became his mentors offering him advise on college education.
Following the example of his friends at Yale he has also founded a mentoring program at his school to help other students like himself get into top colleges.
He made a strong impression with college admission officers with his main college essay in which he narrated how he struggled in the early years to adapt to the U.S. cultural environment, especially learning about U.S. history in school.
Ekeh said he has often asked his parents “Why did you move us all across the Atlantic to America?”
Like many Nigerian middle class professionals, his family was “comfortable” in Nigeria, yet chose to move to the U.S.
“My parents left comfortable lives in Nigeria for their kids to have (new) opportunities… like educational opportunities. So I take advantage of every single opportunity that has been afforded to me,” he said.
The story of Ekeh’s family is typical. Many Nigerian and Ghanaian immigrants to North America are highly skilled professionals — lawyers, accountants, managerial professionals, bankers, medical doctors, engineers, scientists and IT professionals — who would admit if you asked them that they chose to emigrate to North America only to provide their children with better educational opportunities, rather than to improve their own economic status.
It is often the case that many West African professionals take the risk of giving up the security of high-salaried jobs at home to move to North America where they are often forced to temporarily accept petty clerical and even menial jobs for what they believe to be a brighter future for their offspring.
For instance, Ekeh’s parents, Paul and Roseline, took minor clerical positions at a Target store in Queens they would likely have considered demeaning if offered at a branch of the same chain in Nigeria.
Ekeh, the first of five siblings, admits that he owes much to his parents’ self-sacrificing love, passion for education and commitment to their children’s success.
He told Business Insider, “I’m just a regular kid who has a really strong support system.”
He said his mother was so excited when she learned he had been admitted in all eight Ivy League schools that she was “screaming her head off.”
Praising his parents, he said, “No matter how many times they would get knocked down, they were always positive.”
But he also credited his school and community, saying, “I am very humbled by this. I see this as not an accomplishment for me, but as an accomplishment for my school, my community. I really see this as my mission to inspire the next generation not just in Elmont, but overall.”
Ekeh, who spoke of his passion for science, said he wants to major in neurobiology or chemistry, and later become a medical doctor. He said his ambition is to become a neurosurgeon.
“When other kids would say, ‘I want to be a superhero or police officer,’ I would say, ‘I want to know what is on the inside of us.”
He was a semifinalist in the 2015 Intel Science Talent Search for his research work on how DHA slows down the progress of Alzheimer’s disease. Ekeh’s interest in the debilitating disease of old age came from witnessing his grandmother succumb to the condition when he was only 11.
According to CNN Money, the laboratory in which he toiled to complete his award-winning research was a modest one staffed by only one part-time but dedicated chemistry teacher.
The principal at his school John Capozzi, described Ekeh as “one of the most humble young men I’ve ever had the opportunity to meet.”
Ekeh, a salutatorian, maintains an extracurricular life worthy of Superman himself. He is the director of the youth choir he personally founded at his church and a senior drummer. He is the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, a member of the drama club, and the vice president of the Model UN team.
He speaks the Spanish language. He also speaks his native southeast Nigerian language, Igbo, and through his parents has learned the culture of his Igbo ethnic group – a lesson for those minorities of African descent who abandon themselves to a slavishly ingratiating pursuit of assimilation that entails repudiating their racial and ethnic roots and adopting the supercilious attitude of unsympathetic outsiders to the less successful of their kind.
He concluded with satisfaction that, “My parents’ hard work and my hard work finally paid off.”
His advises other high school students aspiring to college education by quoting his parents: “The secret to success is unbridled resolve.”
