16-year-old Louisiana girl gets accepted to 60 colleges

Kye Price

Updated: May 6, 2024 / 09:37 PM CDT

JENNINGS, La. (KLFY) — A 16-year-old girl from Jennings is graduating from high school and will be heading off to college in just a few months.

Alanah Poullard is paving her path to greatness, graduating high school at just the age of 16 and being accepted into 60 colleges in the country.

“It’s happening so fast it feels like I just started my first year of high school, like my first day of high school, and now to say I’m graduating is just a shock,” Poullard said.

In addition to being accepted into 60 universities, Poullard said she has received over a million dollars in scholarships. She said she has a passion for medicine and spoke of an internship she earned at the American Academy of Medicine and Surgery at the University of California this past summer.

“I get an email that I got accepted,” Poullard said. “When I say I ran to that bathroom so quick, and I was jumping up and down. I had jumped out of my heels. I was so happy.”

Poullard has also gone viral as a child, when she met former president Barack Obama.

“Still to this day I don’t realize how hard it is to meet the president,” Poullard said. “My daddy told me before we walked in that White House. He’s like ‘When you see the president run up to him and I bet you’ll go viral’. It’s been like 11 years. I just think that’s so crazy.”

As she heads off to college in a few months, she leaves a few words of wisdom for those who have big dreams.

“Just because you don’t have a high A-C-T score or your grades might not be that good, you can still apply to that school if you want to,” Poullard said. “I guarantee you when you have a long list of community services that you’ve done, that’s going to say a lot about you as a person.”

Poullard said she will be attending Louisiana State University to major in microbiology, and soon after plans to head to medical school where she hopes to become a trauma surgeon.