The student who worked among Columbia PhDs at just 16 and got into all 8 Ivies made her college decision

Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, the Long Island high-school senior who got accepted into all eight Ivy League schools, finally made her choice.

She will be attending Harvard University next fall.

"I feel a sense of relief but also a little sad that I had to reject the other 11," Uwamanzu-Nna told Newsday.

In addition to all of the Ivies, she was accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and New York University.

Uwamanzu-Nna chose Harvard, in part, due to its strength in STEM - an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math - subjects, according to Newsday.

She has a demonstrated interest in science and, at 16, was the youngest researcher in a Columbia University lab, working among PhD and master's students in summer 2015.

Her persistence, started by a high school civil-engineering research project, led her to Columbia's lab.

Uwamanzu-Nna said that she wanted to learn about fluid mechanics by way of measuring the strength of samples, but her school didn't have the proper high-tech apparatus for such work.

"I had to jury-rig this weird thing and use bench weights from my school's weight room to measure the strength of samples," she told Business Insider in a previous interview.

After an initial rejection for a lab position at Columbia between her sophomore and junior years, Uwamanzu-Nna kept in touch with a researcher and was eventually accepted to work there the following summer.

"The head researcher at Columbia was very impressed by my tenacity, by my persistence, and by the fact that I was 16 and doing cement and concrete research," she said.

She believes that spirit was the driving force behind her college acceptances.

"As a high schooler, what really explains my recent accomplishment is finding something I am passionate about," she said, "and not being afraid of stepping outside of my comfort zone."