After meeting her classmates from around the world, she was surprised to hear that many students had lived in several locations. Even beyond the international cohort at Princeton, Lara was in awe of how her peers viewed the world as wholly accessible.

“What I heard about Princeton’s focus on undergraduate education not only proved to be true, but also continued to impress me on a daily basis,” says Rosen.“I cannot imagine an undergraduate student at any institution in the world getting a higher quality education,” he adds. “The professors in every department are leading thinkers in their fields. I almost took it for granted every time I attended a lecture by a Nobel laureate or when I learned that I was using a textbook that my professor wrote.”

She was the first graduate of Crenshaw High School to attend Princeton, the first person in her family to attend college and now is operating a business that teaches financial literacy to low-income youth and adults.

Four years later, he applied and was accepted to a graduate program in musicology at Yale University, where he is currently working on a dissertation that has its roots in his undergraduate senior thesis.

She was pitching her idea for an international nonprofit to reduce poverty and build bridges between privileged and underprivileged youth. “We had five minutes to present an idea with a few slides that changed every 20 seconds,” she says.  

Her epiphany on truly effective tutoring came when she decided to volunteer for a Princeton-supported program in Trenton, New Jersey, a city very different from her own.

Today he is the owner of Boo Bicycles, a bicycle company specializing in handmade, race-winning bamboo frames, as well as co-owner of Aluboo Bikes, a more accessible line of bamboo bikes with the Boo heritage.

When Frey got his first mountain bike at age 12 in Des Moines, Iowa, he quickly learned about its mechanical components and how to work on it. "We call it ‘getting geeked out' in the cycling world," he says. "So I guess I would say I was an engineer before a cyclist. The cool gadgetry of cycling got me interested in the sport."

For decades his grandfather led pro-democracy opposition to Nicaragua’s dictatorial government through journalism. His grandmother, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, served as Nicaragua’s president in the 1990s. Both his parents work for nongovernmental organizations there — his father for an entrepreneurship development organization, and his mother carrying on the journalistic work of her parents.