New York High Schooler Who Lost Her Home to Hurricane Sandy Accepted to 7 Ivy League Schools

Zain Haidar
Published: April 21,2015



 

High schooler Daria Rose has been accepted to seven Ivy League schools more than two years after Hurricane Sandy caused severe damage to her home.
(Sacred Heart Academy )

When Hurricane Sandy smashed into the East Coast in October 2012, Long Island high schooler Daria Rose almost lost everything, but now she's making national buzz for her remarkable comeback.
Rose, 18, applied to seven Ivy League schools and has since been accepted to each one. That means Rose has the option to attend Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania or Princeton. Rose didn't apply to Columbia.

The exterior of Daria Rose's home after Hurricane Sandy struck and a fire forced her family to move.
(Sacred Heart Academy )

ABC News reports that Rose was a sophomore in high school when Sandy swept through and forced her family to evacuate their home in Baldwin, New York. (MORE: Remembering Hurricane Sandy Two Years Later)
When her neighbor's house exploded, Rose's home caught fire and the family had to leave permanently. Rose says she lost all her belongings in that blaze and bounced from hotels to relatives' homes for the next year or so.
"It was hard because it's really unpredictable when you don't have a stable place to live," Rose told ABC News. "[You] don't know if you're moving here next, or there."
Despite the instability and chaos, however, Rose thrived at school. In her admissions essays, Rose talked about the experience.
"It talks about the storm, but the focus is how reading helped me cope," Rose said. "I was living in these small spaces but in my head I was able to escape ... find myself in a literary world."
In an email to weather.com, Sacred Heart Academy spokesperson Karen Rienzi described Rose as a "service-minded academic superstar" and Rienzi's point is clear given that Rose was also accepted to Stanford, SUNY Binghamton, UC Los Angeles, Duke, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, USC and St. John's University in addition to the Ivies.
Besides her academic achievements, Rose works at the Town Attorney's office in the summer and volunteers at a physical therapy clinic among many other extracurricular activities.
Rose hasn't made a final decision, but she has until May 1 to make the call on where she'll attend. The 18-year-old plans to study Russian literature and political science.
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