Teen who lost everything in Hurricane Sandy gets into 7 Ivy League schools
theGrio REPORT - Daria Rose, a Sacred Heart High School senior, has received 14 acceptance letters to colleges across the country, including 7 Ivy League schools.
Daria Rose, a Sacred Heart High School senior, has received 14 acceptance letters to colleges across the country, including 7 Ivy League schools. Even more impressively, her acceptance comes after she and her family lost everything and had to rebuild their lives following Hurricane Sandy.
“It’s hard being a teenager and losing all these clothes and makeup and jewelry,” Rose said of her family’s situation after the hurricane destroyed their home and everything they had. “We had to move form hotel to hotel. We stayed with my grandmother for a couple of months, then moved back to a hotel.”
Still, Rose said never gave up. “It’s easy to say I’m just going to lay here in a ball and cry and wallow in my own self pity,” her mother, Katrina Brooks, said. “I’d make sure she’d get up and put one foot in front of the other.”
Hurricane Sandy hit during Rose’s sophomore year, and she finished out her high school education with high marks despite the odds. She started to work toward college, using her story of her life after Sandy as her application essay, and as the acceptance letters started to pour in, Rose could hardly believe it.
“I was like, oh my God, I just got into Harvard,” she said. “Then I checked Princeton, and I was like, oh my God I, just got into Princeton. And I checked Brown, I got in. It just kept going and going.”
Rose can see a great future ahead of her, built from the ruins of a rough past.
