Tweet By Girl With 31 College Acceptances Goes Viral
Mar 1, 2019, 2:32 PM | Updated: Jun 8, 2022, 5:15 pm
FAIRBURN, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia high-school senior’s tweet about being accepted by 31 colleges and universities has gone viral.
Kayla Willis said she applied to so many schools to show others that someone with good grades can make it, even with average scores on standardized tests, WXIA-TV reported . She said her SAT score was 1,160 but she has a 3.95 grade-point average. The SAT ‘s combined scores on its math and language tests range from 400 to 1600.
“I wanted to inspire people and show them that you can actually dream big and get to where you want to go,” she said.
The teen from Fairburn, near Atlanta, said she applied to 50 schools, and hasn’t yet heard from some.
Willis sent the tweet Feb. 24, with a photo of a wall at Westlake High School where she and other students have posted bumper-sticker style notices. Each is headlined “ACCEPTED!” with a school seal or logo, name, and any scholarship offer.
By noon Friday, the tweet had more than 2,000 replies and 149,000 likes.
i kinda didn’t want to post this, but someone said “the whole world needs to know how great you are” so here we go twitter! pic.twitter.com/g58Xd0w1w2
— Kayla E. Willis 💋 (@kaegenic) February 24, 2019
Principal Jamar Roberson said it also prompted responses at school. “It’s just been contagious and I’ve had so many students come up to me and say, ‘Hey, here’s my acceptances, I want to put them on the wall’,” he said.
Willis said scholarship offers have totaled $900,000. She tweeted that she passed up a $100,000 offer because it wasn’t a full scholarship, and will be going to her top choice — Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee — on a “full ride.”
Fisk offered her $40,000, according to the photograph.
Willlis said she wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to share her accomplishment on social media. So she asked her father. She said he told her, “You need to show the world how great you are.”
