Dec. 23, 2016 – West Bend, WI – West Bend East High School senior Emmanuel Garrison-Hooks has been accepted into Harvard University.
“I’ll be part of the class of 2021,” he said humbly.
Garrison-Hooks filled out the application for Harvard in October. The results arrived Tuesday, Dec. 13. “I rushed home from wrestling practice and I waited until my parents got home,” he said. “It was 6:15 p.m. and we all opened the letter at that time.”
While Garrison-Hooks refers to the notice as “a letter” he said it was actually “an update online on my Harvard application status portal.”
He said he held the cursor over the “view” button for a while before finally clicking the update. “I was nervous,” he said. “I was scared.”
“I was comfortable with whatever result I was going to get because I absolutely put my soul into my application,” he said of his supplemental essay.
Garrison-Hooks wrote about himself. “It was about how I viewed the world; it was very introspective,” he said.
The application to Harvard University is the only one Garrison-Hooks submitted.
For all his trepidation the 18-year-old is a confident yet quiet-spoken young man. During an interview this week in the Silver Lining Arts Center, Garrison-Hooks sat in a chair, his light brown Allen Edmond shoe perched on the opposite knee and he smoothed the leg of his pants in nervous strokes while he spoke.
For the past four years Garrison-Hooks has been a student at West Bend East; prior to that he was at St. Peter Emmanuel on the north side of Milwaukee and Morgandale School on the south side of Milwaukee.
During his final year of high school, Garrison-Hooks is doing anything but coasting. “I have AP-physics, AP-literature, AP-U.S. History, French 3, and AP calculus,” he said.
With an eye on majoring in neuroscience and a career in the medical field, Garrison-Hooks said his current off-hours reading is designed to push him ahead of his peers. “I’m reading two books right now; one on neuroplasticity and one on development of the mind over time,” he said.
A part of the East Sun’s wrestling team Garrison-Hooks said he’s able to balance his academics and athletics on little sleep. “Lots of late nights, but doing both has really taught me how to allocate my time,” he said.
A self-described “serious student,” Garrison-Hooks said he worked extremely hard to get to where he is today. “I basically killed myself to get here,” he said.
Garrison-Hooks expects to graduate with honors. His next step, will be to get to Boston.
“I haven’t even visited the campus,” he said. “That’s already scheduled for April 22 – 24 and I cannot wait. The level of excellence there is going to be other-worldly and I’m going to love it.”
