Immigrant Boy With 3.94 GPA Accepted In 122 Colleges, Aspires To Be A Pop Star

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Helms Ategeka wants to be a pop star. But when he told his dad he planned to pursue a music degree after his graduation next month from high school, his father wasn’t exactly thrilled.

So last fall, the Oakland, California, teenager took a different approach: He started applying to colleges. More than 150 of them.

Before long, he got an acceptance letter. Then another. And another. The trickle became a flood until there were 122 of them — along with some $5.3 million in proposed grants and scholarship offers. (CNN has viewed the acceptance letters.)

His father says he’s proud of Helms’ 3.94 GPA and had hoped his son would pick a career with financial stability, like medicine or computer technology. Or maybe Helms might follow in his own footsteps as a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of California, Berkeley.

But as he watched the mountain of acceptance letters in his son’s room get bigger with every mail delivery, Chris Ategeka’s hope dimmed. The messages on the multicolored envelopes beckoned with undeniable enthusiasm. “You’re in!” one said. “Our family welcomes your family! read another.

“He’s so confident that music is what he wants to do, it would be a disservice for me to try to guide him otherwise … that’s why he applied to a gazillion colleges to prove a point,” Ategeka says. “I told him, ‘You want to be a musician? It takes a lot of hard work.’ And his reaction was, I’ll use my determination to do this to show you how hard I can work.”
 

Helms’ life revolves around music. At Head-Royce High School in Oakland he’s part of an a cappella group that meets every week to belt out covers of popular pop music. His room is stacked with CDs by Beyoncé, Prince and Bruno Mars. Before he starts college in the fall, he’s taking a summer trip to Peru with a choir to perform in churches and communities.

“I live for music. I spend most of my time either listening to music, making music or out there performing,” Helms says. “I feel the most alive and fulfilled when I’m doing something related to music.”

So when he started his college application journey, he had one key requirement: The school needed to have a strong music program.

 

A small group of schools, including Brown, Wesleyan and Colgate, rejected him or placed him on their waiting list.

But the much longer list of schools that said yes spans the country, from big state universities to smaller private colleges: Bard College, Drexel, Howard, Loyola Marymount, Sarah Lawrence College — and yes, UC Berkeley.

Ategeka immigrated to the US from his homeland in Uganda in late 2000s to attend the University of California, Berkeley. He left Helms with his mother in the western Ugandan town of Fort Portal, where he lived until he joined his father in California five years ago.

Soon after Helms came to the US in 2019, the world largely shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. He attended his new school via Zoom and missed out on a big part of interacting with others and learning the nuances of American culture. As a result, he wasn’t sure his college applications would resonate or meet a lot of the requirements, he says.

As an immigrant, Helms is part of a growing demographic. Children born abroad or in the US to an immigrant parent accounted for 58% of the increase in the nation’s college enrollment between 2000 and 2018, a study by the Migration Policy Institute shows. “The face of US higher education is changing,” the study says. “Students are more likely to come from immigrant families than in the past.”

Helms’ new chapter comes at a precarious time for US colleges and universities as Berkeley and other schools grapple with the aftermath of pro-Palestinian student protests that have led to disruptions, arrests and debates about the limits of free speech.

But Ategeka says his son’s journey has reminded him to be open to new possibilities and ways of thinking. He believes Helms will find appropriate ways to be a part of difficult campus conversations.

“College is not about conforming to status quo … it is ground zero for training leaders who shape the future. It is in college that the young minds rethink the old and build the new for humanity and our planet,” he says.

Helms is excited to follow in his father’s footsteps at Berkeley, which has an admission rate of about 12%. Of the nearly 126,000 students who applied in fall of 2023, only about 15,000 were accepted.

But most importantly, he says, he’s looking forward to taking the next step toward being a professional musician.

https://www.aol.com/accepted-122-colleges-5-3-133316404.html

 

This is inspiring. Hope he will be someone that he wants to be.

[SpadesToStart 3,808]

Applying to >150 colleges is bananas. That’s a couple grand in application fees, and so much unnecessary extra work. 

[Madame Goo Goo 4,132]

13 minutes ago, SpadesToStart said:

Applying to >150 colleges is bananas. That’s a couple grand in application fees, and so much unnecessary extra work. 

Yeah. These articles never impress me. Any high school senior with at least a 3.0 can apply to 150 colleges and get in. What are the colleges is the question? 5.3 million in scholarships also means nothing, it’s not like he gets any money if he ends up not attending. A worthless endeavor IMHO.

[pachinko 10,753]

What’s his insta?

[Roughhouse Dandy 13,606]

Good for him! 

[JorgeX 644]

So? Gaga didn’t go to college 

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4 minutes ago, JorgeX said:

So? Gaga didn’t go to college 

Except she did, but didn't finish.

Also, Gaga said her fans and everyone shpuld definitely finish school 

[PartySick 172,478]

Can honestly say I'm jealous

Ugh I can't wait to go back to school one day. I loved it. It's just so damn expensive and I refuse to go into debt for a piece of paper that says I'm educated.