Isaiah Wellington Lynn, who was brought up in a lone parent family in east London, graduated this summer and has now been selected from 31,000 applicants to be one of just 140 interns on a prestigious Silicon Valley scheme aimed at creating tech entrepreneurs of the future.
He was forced to crowdfund the fees for the elite and highly-selective year-long Harvard visiting undergraduate programme after a charity scholarship fell through last summer when he was in the second year of his anthropology degree at University College London (UCL).
After an intensive four-month selection process to win the place at Harvard, he refused to accept defeat and set up a website, #StratfordtoHarvard, and YouTube channel. He raised the £65,000 in a month from 700 donors across the UK, USA, Spain, Canada, Jamaica and Uganda.
