Saheela Ibraheem, of Edison, N.J., is every college's dream. She plays soccer, softball, the trombone. She scored an almost perfect SAT. And she's a nice, humble, normal girl.
"I want to study neuroscience, neurobiology," Saheela said. "It comes down to the support I've had at home, from my parents and brother, every step of the way.
Saheela applied to 14 colleges. She got into Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Stanford, Williams, Washington University, Brown, Cornell, University of Chicago, University of North Carolina, and Cal Tech. The only rejection was from Yale. No one is quite sure why.
"I don't know!" she said.
But what might be most amazing about Saheela -- she is 15.
"Most of the time, they say I'm mature for my age," Saheela said. "I guess that Age isn't everything."
Her mom knew Saheela was something special at an early age.
"When you teach her 1, 2, 3 but she want more," said Shakirat Ibraheem, the proud mother. "When you teach her 1 through 5, she'd say how about this."
Saheela skipped the sixth and ninth grades. By high school, she'd switched from public to private. Her Edison school feels lucky to have her.
"She has it all. She's the whole package," said Susan Swenson of the Wardlaw-Hartridge School. "She really is."
"I want to move with her. I want to go with her," Shakirat Ibraheem said.
For sure, she'll miss high school -- the friends, the sports, the prom.
"It's pretty much one of our last chances to be together as a class," she said. "I can't wait."
But it just takes a few seconds of meeting Saheela Ibraheem to know that is probably not the last time we'll hear her name.
"It's your life and it's important that you take advantage of it," Saheela said. "If it means going to college younger, that's just the way life is for you."
In case you're wondering: she decided to go to Harvard.
Saheela also excels outside the classroom. She is a three-sport athlete, playing outfield for the school’s softball team, defender on the soccer team, and swimming relays and 50-meter races for the swim team. She also sings alto in the school choir, plays trombone in the school band and serves as president of the school’s investment club, which teaches students about the stock market by investing in virtual stocks.
Saheela joins a growing number of New Jersey students going to college before they are old enough to drive. Last year, Kyle Loh of Mendham graduated from Rutgers at 16. In previous years, a 14-year-old from Cranbury and two of his 15-year-old cousins also graduated from Rutgers.
For Saheela, her unusual path to college began when she was a sixth-grader at the Conackamack Middle School in Piscataway. Eager to learn more about her favorite subject, math, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants asked to move to a higher-level class. The school let her skip sixth grade entirely.
By high school, Saheela said, she was no longer feeling challenged by her public school classes. So, she moved to the Wardlaw-Hartridge School, a 420-student private school, where she skipped her freshman year and enrolled as a 10th-grader. Her three younger brothers, twins now in the ninth grade and a younger brother in second grade, all eventually joined her at the school.
School officials were impressed Saheela, one of their top students, didn’t spend all her time studying.
“She’s learned and she’s very smart. But she keeps pushing herself,” said William Jenkins, the Wardlaw-Hartridge School’s director of development.
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