The Malaysian-Taiwanese teen who cracked every Ivy League school wants to be...
Media is power for Cassandra Hsiao, whose admissions essay focused on the stresses and challenges of being a young US immigrant from Asia
At first glance, it might be hard to imagine how a girl who just got accepted into every Ivy League school would somehow feel like she didn’t fit in.
Hsiao chronicled her story, not unfamiliar to many or most young immigrants, that won her a ticket to every one of the eight most elite universities in the United States.
The essay that swayed admission officers along the East Coast as well as at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, told of Hsiao’s push-and-pull with the English language within her own Malaysian family and in the outside world at the same time.
She moved to the US when she was five years old, but Hsiao remembers growing up feeling guilty for continuing to associate herself with Malaysia and Taiwan, her mother and father’s home countries. “I didn’t feel authentic enough, like I didn’t truly belong there,” she said. “But as for America, I’m not what a typical American should look like, either.”
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