He’s been accepted to 122 colleges with $5.3 million in scholarships. His choice came down to his love of music
By Faith Karimi, CNN
7 minute read
Updated 9:33 AM EDT, Sat May 18, 2024
Helms Ategeka with some of his many college acceptance letters. He graduates from high school next month in Oakland, California.
Courtesy Christopher Ategeka
CNN —
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.”
But how does an 18-year-old begin narrowing down such a massive list of options? And so began a journey that came with tough lessons on change and compromise — for both father and son.
He had a key requirement for the colleges he applied to
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.
Helms Ategeka: “I feel the most alive and fulfilled when I’m doing something related to music.”
Courtesy Christopher Ategeka
He mostly used universities’ online portals for his applications, he says, which made it easier to copy and paste his information to multiple places. His father paid the application fee required by some universities. Helms spent many hours writing essays for different schools, although most were variations of the same personal story. In his essays, he highlighted his passion for music and his background as an immigrant.
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.