Back to School: Wie To Attend Stanford
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Michelle Wie celebrated her first victory of the year — she got accepted to Stanford.
The 17-year-old senior at Punahou School in Honolulu said yesterday she would enroll in the fall, dispelling any talk she would concentrate exclusively on her professional golf career once she finished high school.
“No one really believed me,” Wie said from Orlando, Fla., where she is working with swing coach David Leadbetter. “Now that I got into Stanford … it was one of my dreams, and I want to go through with it. I definitely want to go there and really try to graduate.”
Wie has been mixing school and tour golf since she played three LPGA Tour events at age 12. She turned professional in October 2005 and earned close to $20 million this year from endorsements, earnings and appearance money overseas.
And while she still hasn’t won on the LPGA Tour — she had three close calls in the majors — Wie said her nerves were never more jangled than waiting to see if she had been accepted. She got the news Friday.
Wie’s grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle went to Stanford, and that was her first choice all along.
“I got an e-mail on Wednesday telling me the directions to find out online, with a password and pin code,”she said. “I think they do that on purpose. They enjoy making people suffer for two days. I was counting down the days — Friday at 1 p.m. was like doomsday. I was really stressed out. I had stomach aches, and Thursday I couldn’t eat anything.”
After a final exam Friday morning, she asked to be excused from English, bringing two friends to the computer lab to punch in the code and see if she had been accepted.
“They screamed, I screamed, we were reading the letter out loud, and everyone gave us these weird looks,” she said.