When Sharhea Wade arrived at Bryn Mawr College from a big-city high school, it seemed as if every other student on the quiet, leafy campus had graduated from an exclusive private school.
”I felt intimidated by them,” Wade said. ”Bryn Mawr is a different world.”
Yet whenever she felt like a fish out of water, Wade could turn to her ”posse” — nine other girls who, like her, had been recruited from struggling school districts and sent on full merit scholarships to the elite women’s college.
Wade’s posse is one of dozens sent to top-tier universities each year by the New York-based Posse Foundation. Next fall, the program hits the Ivy League when it debuts at Penn.
The numbers bear out how vital a program this is: Posse’s founder noted that there were 12,000 nominations this year to fill 460 slots.
