Thinh Pham, a (Fort Bend County) Texas student, was accepted into all eight prestigious Ivy League schools — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Penn and Yale — on Thursday, as per KHOU 11. With the George Bush High School senior having anyway cracked open the Ivy League path, unlocking admission into other leading US universities was a walk in the park.

Despite checking off an insurmountable higher education dream harboured by many and gaining access into not one but all eight Ivy League schools, the US student is going a different way. “I’m actually not attending an Ivy League school,” he said. “I’m attending MIT.”

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Pham attributed his success to others around him. His teachers and counsellors described him as humble and hardworking. Showering him with praises, they confirmed that even beyond being accepted into the Ivy League schools, several others highly regarded higher education institutions had welcomed him on his next step on the education ladder. He has also earned a whopping $2.8 million in scholarship offers, as per ABC 13.

US student will study computer science and engineering at MIT

Though not an Ivy League school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is ranked No 2 on the US News and World Report’s list of top national universities. Among the several reasons why Thinh Pham has greenlit the decision to pursue his higher studies at MIT, he said he couldn’t wait to be part of the institute’s community.

“MIT has a very quirky community that I love. It’s full of problem solvers, collaborators, just people who just want to work together to help advance tomorrow’s problems and bridge the problems and solutions of humanity,” Pham said.

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The Texas student also confirmed that MIT is giving him a full ride. Pham will be pursuing computer science and engineering. US News and World Report’s annual rankings (2023-24) also placed the tech institute first in its evaluation of undergraduate computer science programs. It came out first in four out of 10 computer science disciplines, as per MIT News.

As his high school community celebrated his achievements, his teachers and counsellors explained what made him so unique. “He comes by the ideas easily, but he always asks more questions, asks more questions, asks more questions, to the point where I would be like, ‘I don’t know, hold on, let’s go find out.’ You know, he pushed me as a teacher to have answers that nobody had really asked for before,” said one of them.