Homeless to Harvard Murray to graduate this June

In 2001, Liz Murray was the keynote speaker at Irish America’s Top 100 event. Photo Gallery: CLICK HERE

By age 16, her mom had died, her father was a drug addict and she was homeless.

But Liz Murray fought the odds, and won – she’s graduating from Harvard this June with a  degree in psychology.

Irish American Murray, whose life was depicted in the Lifetime movie, "From Homeless to Harvard" and whose story became an inspiration to a nation, was born in the Bronx, New York, to impoverished, cocaine-addicted, HIV-infected parents.

She became homeless at 15. Her mother died of AIDS, and her father moved to a homeless men’s shelter.

“I slept on park benches, or on the subway. If it was cold, I rode the trains all night long, or slept in an apartment hallway. There would be days, sometimes a week or two, without showering. There was endless, endless walking. Never a moment to rest,” Murray wrote in The New York Times Upfront magazine in 2000.

The challenges of being destitute didn’t stop Murray from turning her life around.

She brought her father to the Humanities Preparatory Academy in Chelsea, Manhattan and had him convince them she had somewhere to live so she could enroll.

Though she started high school later than most students, and remained homeless while attending school and supporting herself and her sister, Murray managed to graduate in just two years.

“I studied all the time, anywhere I could – school hallways, libraries, stairwells in apartment buildings. I was still homeless, but I finally had a way to show what I could do, and transform everything inside of me into something useful,” Murray wrote.

Then, Murray achieved her next extraordinary accomplishment: getting into Harvard.

She was awarded a New York Times scholarship for needy students and was accepted into Harvard University for fall 2000.

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Nster.com