Monique Vobecky was wrapped up in homework when she got an email from UC Irvine with the subject line “An update to your application.” It was 9 p.m. –– not when she was expecting to get her first college admissions letter. She was excited, not only because she got in, but the school also offered her the Regents scholarship, one of UC Irvine’s most coveted scholarships.
“I was at my desk, doing homework,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. “I wasn’t expecting it to come.”
That acceptance letter kicked off an avalanche of acceptances to high profile colleges across the nation. Vobecky, a 4.67 GPA student and MVP soccer player, was accepted to 18 out of the 18 colleges she applied to, including five Ivy League schools Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell and Brown. All Ivy League schools announce acceptances to students on one day at the same time. It’s called “Ivy Day” and Vobecky was sitting at her computer counting down the seconds with five tabs open to the admissions pages of those five schools.
“It didn’t feel real,” the 17-year-old senior at Glendora High School said. “One minute I was stressing out and the next minute, I was in. I got into the colleges I was dreaming about my whole life.”
Stanford’s acceptance letter came the next day.
Vobecky has always been an overachiever. Since middle school she’s been passionate about volunteering. She’s always loved soccer and in high school, she fell in love with advanced science classes.
She’s also devoted to helping others, founding her own non-profit organization. One day, she hopes to be a role model to others.
“I want the world to see that Black girls are capable of amazing things,” she said. “My mom taught me, no matter what people say about your race or gender, she taught me not to pay attention to that.”
In 2018, when Vobecky was 14, she founded a a group that helps underserved youth excel in both academics and sports. Her 501c3 non-profit the Little Miss Sunshine Foundation provides scholarships for students to take AP exams, gives free athletic equipment to young athletes and also provides hands-on tutoring.
As an athlete, she has been a captain on Glendora High’s soccer team where she was named defensive player of the year in 2018 and team MVP in 2020. Though she didn’t pursue all these extracurriculars and advanced classes just so she could get into a prestigious college. She just really likes science, so she joined all the science clubs at school and shadowed surgeons and doctors in her free time. She even taught herself how to play the violin when she was in sixth grade so she could play on her school’s orchestra.
“I’m passionate about these things,” she said. “I’m involved in the things I love.”
And her parents, Bianca and Pete, never micromanaged her or pushed her to do so many things at once. They probably couldn’t even name a single class she took, she said, but still, they encouraged her and pushed her along the way.
“I can’t say I’m shocked because I know how she is,” said Pete Vobecky, who runs a construction and trucking company with his wife. “Whatever she does, she gives 120%.”
As of Wednesday, April 28, Monique Vobecky said she’s pretty locked in on going to Harvard, but she isn’t completely committed yet. She has until May 3 to make her final decision. Though she’s been to the campus in Massachusetts and loves it, despite the cold.
Wherever she goes, she plans to study pre-medicine with hopes to become a doctor one day. In high school, she shadowed surgeons for 20 surgeries. She loves the blood and the guts and the stress of it all, but mostly, she’ll continue helping people.
While academics and extracurriculars consume a lot of her life, she still finds downtime when she can to watch T.V. or talk to her friends. She also loves visiting used book stores or Barnes & Noble to find classic books or fiction. She recently finished reading “All the Light We Cannot See,” a novel about a blind girl in Paris during World War II. It won a Pulitzer in 2015.
Outside of those hobbies, she also keeps saltwater fish. She has a 40-gallon tank in her house for fish that she takes care of every week, which she says can truly be a chore, but she still loves caring for those fish and learning about biology through them.
In college, Vobecky still plans to be involved with the things she loves. She hopes to play for a school’s club soccer team, she said, and she plans to still be involved in her non-profit remotely.
“We don’t know all the reasons why all the universities accepted her,” her mother Bianca said in a statement. “What we know is that my daughter, a Black teenager from Glendora, California, put in the work to excel academically and take time to shine light in the lives of so many others.”
