West Lauderdale High School senior receives full scholarship to Yale.

Gabe Broome is thankful and even excited after being chosen as a Quest Bridge scholar after being offered a full scholarship.

Quest Bridge National College Match helps high achieving students that come from low-income families to attend the top 10 colleges in the nation.

“What this really does is, it lets me go far away from home for college, I think it will be nice. It’ll be; you know, more independence than just going somewhere that’s a little closer and not only that but because of Yale’s prestige; like where it’s ranked in the world. I think I’ll get to meet a lot of people who generally you know, I would never rub shoulders with.”

While Quest Bridge Scholarship matched Broome, that decision was not easy.

“Some other colleges on my list were; University of Pennsylvania, M-I-T, Columbia, was on my list as well as Rice, and some other ones, but: I guess the reason all of them are on my list is that first of all; they are fairly well known, but they’re well known because they’re good."

Broome says the diversity of the student body at Yale is what attracted him to the school.

“In particular Yale has a pretty diverse student body, it has a lot of people that have different ideas , I guess and that’s what I was really excited about, is getting in the mix with all of these different people with different experiences than I do.”

Broome says growing up wasn’t easy and there were financial hardships he and his family had to bare.

“It was a kind of thing where we didn’t always have what we wanted all the time, I guess; It was money is tight, ends met but just barely like in the nick of time.

Money struggles were something Broome refused to let get in the way of his college dreams.

“I kind of always thought like, you know; I’m going to go to school and then graduate high school, and go to college, I guess that’s what I always thought; It’s kind of been like ingrained into me.”

Broome says he is grateful for being relieved of any student loans thanks to Quest Scholarship.

“The big thing is that it is zero contribution for parent contribution which is really cool because my mom she does really good actually, but she’s a single mother of four children and so you know, she’s doing a lot, but I didn’t want her to have to pay for college.”