Korean Girl Gets Bill Gates Scholarship
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
A Korean girl living in the U.S. in a single bedroom apartment with three other family members recently received a scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, showing that diligence is all it takes to achieve one's dream.
Korea Times USA on Tuesday reported that 19 year-old Choi Sae-rom was selected as one of the Bill and Melinda Gates scholarship students. She will receive money for both the undergraduate and graduate programs.
The foundation's official said that Choi had the leadership, personality and good school grades that were needed to win the scholarship.
The soon-to-be graduate of Vermont High School in California has already received admission offers from Stanford and UC Berkeley.
What makes Choi's achievement special is that she had to overcome her family's poverty and being an immigrant.
When she faced poverty _ where she had to start studying late at night to avoid noise and concentrate on her studying or when she had to borrow textbooks from school library because she could not afford 50 dollar-textbooks _ she'd always say to herself, ``If there's a dream, even poverty can be a friend to help me achieve it,''
The majority of her schoolmates did not have English as a mother tongue and her school concentrated on providing them with second language classes. She didn't have much opportunity to take advanced program classes _ study university subjects at high school_ and she took the rest of her classes at community colleges nearby.
It's not that she was just a bookworm. She was more than that; she volunteered at a local library and local cancer clinic. Her experience at the hospital inspired her future career.
``I want to become a cancer researcher and find a cure for it,'' Choi said. ``I set the goal and I will do my best to achieve it,'' she added.
The Bill and Melinda Foundation, founded by IT tycoon Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, offers scholarships to 1,000 students a year and this year, there were more than 11,000 applicants.