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Aug 06, 2008, 12:31PM

Formerly Homeless Student Entering The Ivy League

A few years ago a media firestorm started when a homeless New York girl was accepted into Harvard, culminating in a Lifetime TV movie. But after the celebrity attention died down, she ended up dropping out after a semester. New Penn student Steven Vaughn-Lewis hopes that a comparably lower profile will help him overcome his own unstable upbringing.

When Elizabeth Murray joined the Harvard class of 2003, her story became a national sensation. She lived on the New York City streets for years after being born to drug-addicted parents and eventually found inspiration in education after her mother's AIDS-related death - a story that was turned into the Emmy-nominated Lifetime movie, Homeless to Harvard.

Ultimately though, Murray ended up dropping out of Harvard after just one semester, returning and then leaving again - a path that incoming freshman Steven-Vaughn Lewis hopes to avoid.

Vaughn-Lewis, whose story recently captured the attention of many across the nation after an early July feature in The Philadelphia Inquirer, grew up in and out of foster care, which was punctured by a short stint of homelessness.

"My childhood was very different from most," he said. "It was completely unstable."

Although Vaughn-Lewis wasn't always enrolled in elementary schools, after attending public school near his grandmother's house he transferred in the sixth grade to Julia R. Masterman Middle School, which Newsweek rated the 74th best public school in the nation in 2006 - the highest rank of any public school in Pennsylvania.

At Masterman, Vaughn-Lewis was inspired by his biology and chemistry teachers. He went on to conduct research at Penn on the relationship between smell and memories during his sophomore year of high school. The research won him a gold medal in the George Washington Carver Science Fair and inspired him to apply to Penn.

"I didn't realize that it was an Ivy League or selective [at the time]," said Vaughn-Lewis. "But it was a college in Philadelphia, and I wanted to go."

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