On a mid-April Wednesday morning, when Ana Cuellar's father and older sister Cristina burst into her bedroom in Watts with the thick package from the Post Office, the senior at Notre Dame Academy was still asleep. Her dad's half-excited, half-delighted voice woke her up. And when she glanced at the package inside the plastic mail envelope, she had what can only be described by a teenager as a "wow!" moment.

"I was speechless," the 18-year-old, youngest-of-five children recalls today. "I couldn't even stand up and scream. It was like, 'This is it!' This was the one [scholarship application] that was eight essays long, that took me days and days of writing over Christmas break."

Inside the package was a folder held together by a Velcro strip, which spread out to three panels. One contained a certificate, another had sheets of information and there tucked in a third was the letter.

The first paragraph's words were words Ana had only dared dream about:

"Congratulations, we are very pleased to inform you of your selection as a Gates Millennium Scholar. This year the Gates Millennium Scholars program attracted over 20,500 applicants. It is a distinct honor for one of the 1,000 Gates Millennium Scholars for the GMS class of 2009, the program's 10th anniversary class. We commend you on your strong leadership, community service and academic achievements that have distinguished you as a leader for America's future."

Against longer odds than a 100-to-1 shot in the Santa Anita Derby, the inner-city teenager had followed her older brother Norberto in winning the highly competitive scholarship that covers all expenses not funded by a college plus health insurance. But what makes the GMS award, which serves minority students, really special is how it provides seamless support not only for undergraduate work, but all the way through graduate school to a Ph.D.

The goal of the nation's largest minority scholarship program is to free up students from work-study requirements so they can concentrate solely on academics, which Ana plans to do starting this September at prestigious Brown University. Founded in 1764, the Providence, Rhode Island, institution today is noted for its open curriculum, where there aren't any core required classes, students can enroll in any class on campus and "concentrations" replace traditional majors.

What makes Ana run?
Ana Cuellar graduated from Notre Dame Academy earlier this month with a stellar 4.3 grade point average, having earned all A's in her regular as well as honors and advanced placement classes. One of her favorite subjects was English (her second language; her Mexican-American parents speak Spanish at home). The young scholar also reports that she's not a "science person" or very good in math, even though she aced both honors physics and pre-calculus as a senior.

When asked if she studies a lot or is just naturally a brain, she grins and says, "No. I got a little bit of the 'naturally smart' in Spanish class because Spanish is my first language. So when I took Spanish, I was like, 'Ahhh, this is what it feels like to not have to study and get away with it.' Everything else, I had to study for."

Her demanding high school schedule and rigorous study habits, in fact, would put many college students to shame.

The weekday alarm went off at six o'clock, so she and four other former students at St. Lawrence of Brindisi School could make the one-hour-plus, cross-town commute from Watts to Notre Dame Academy in West Los Angeles. The van, supplied by the urban Capuchin Franciscan parish, was driven by Ana's father, a former plumber who is disabled with back injuries.

When she got home around 4 o'clock in the same van, her mother had supper ready so Ana could have a hot meal before hitting the books by five. With a break for a shower, the studying went on until at least midnight. Watching TV wasn't even an option.

So where did an inner-city kid like Ana get her amazing drive and academic dedication? The answer starts with her four older siblings, all of whom graduated from St. Lawrence of Brindisi School.

Cristina, the big sister, also went to Notre Dame Academy and recently earned a master's degree in school administration from Loyola Marymount University. She runs the innovative work-study program at Verbum Dei High School in Los Angeles.

Norberto, a graduate of Occidental College, owns and operates a gas station in Pasadena. Jesus went to Loyola High School and USC. And sister Erika --- a graduate of St. Matthias High School and LMU --- is a manager at the Homegirl Café near Chinatown.

Role models
"For sure, they were my role models," Ana says of her siblings. "You know, they went to LMU, Occidental and USC - good colleges. So it was a natural thing to want to do what they did. I'm sure if they would have dropped out of high school I would have done it, too. If they hadn't gone to college, I wouldn't have gone either.

"I remember I'd always ask them when I'd have a report on owls or some other project to proofread it. They were just there all the time. They were there to help. But it wasn't their help that got me through it as much as their example. Definitely."

Then there were her immigrant parents, Jose and Juana, who came in 1981 to Southern California from Jalisco, Mexico, on their honeymoon seeking a better life. The life turned out to be literally back-breaking toil for plumber Jose, who wore out the cartilage between discs in his spine until he required surgery and became disabled. Meanwhile, Juana worked two jobs as a custodian at LAX and in a daycare center. She still works as a janitor.

"My parents haven't had an easy life," Ana reports. "They always worked hard and sacrificed for us. And they have a very distinct way that they raised us. They weren't pushing us in school. Of course, they could never help us academically because they only had a third-grade education and didn't speak English. But they were always there for us, like 'Here's a cup of milk' when we were studying.

"But they didn't force us to do anything. It had to come from within, and it had to be something we wanted. They told us, 'If you want to get the A's, then you know what you have to do; and if you don't want to, then you're going to have to suffer the consequences.'

"They saw the differences that an education makes in the U.S. My parents were working at the bottom, and they could see the people at the top. And that was the immigrant dream for their children. They wanted their children to not have to be scrubbing toilets and not having to be fixing pipes. They had a vision, and they provided their children with a Catholic education. But it was up to us to get to where we wanted to."

Favorite teachers
Teachers, too, played a big part in Ana's success story. In fact, she has a hard time narrowing down her all-time-favorite educators.

She remembers Mr. Kirwin in second grade at St. Lawrence who went out of his way to compliment her artwork and who taught her how to "shadow" an apple. There was Ms. Flores in fifth grade, who made her students carry so many textbooks home to do homework they feared their hunched-over "backpack-backs" would never straighten out.

But Ms. Sullivan in eighth grade assigned the best classroom project, having students pretend to be one of the explorers they were studying in history class. Ana not only dressed up like Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, but acted out his violent death (another willing student pretended to shoot her with an arrow).

At Notre Dame Academy, Ms. Hurlbut was her honors physics teacher, student council moderator as well as track coach. She recalls her junior year AP English language instructor, Ms. Tumpak, as a "fountain of knowledge." The teacher changed the way Ana thought about English by combining it with history. And her honors English teacher the year before at NDA, Ms. Batter, really improved her writing by handing back graded essays with detailed comments and then having students correct their own mistakes for more credit.

At St. Lawrence of Brindisi, she received tuition awards from the Catholic Education Foundation. At Notre Dame Academy, she earned in-school scholarships.

"A Catholic school education, I think, was definitely key for me getting a good education," Ana notes. "Just the smaller classes and one-on-one attention really helped me grow and prosper. A moral education was something my parents did a very good job with, and even from my siblings I learned it. But then it was nurtured all 13 years in Catholic school."

Still, even with all this support and modeling, it's difficult for Ana Cuellar to think about leaving her close-knit family, teachers and lifelong friends - never mind moving to a part of the country that has four distinct seasons she's never come close to experiencing firsthand.

"Never in my mind have I thought of leaving L.A., let alone California, to go to the East Coast," she says, shaking her head. "Family is huge for us. So it was a really hard decision, actually, to be able to say, 'OK, I'm gonna leave.' Because all of my siblings, they all stayed in L.A."

And she knows it's especially difficult for her parents since she's their "baby." But she's also buoyed by the fact that her mother is making the trip to Rhode Island in early September to help her get settled in her dorm.

"I'm scared, I'm nervous, you know, as a Latina from a low-income family going to an Ivy League school," Ana confides with a semi-worried but unwavering expression. "It's going to be emotionally draining. I'm going to struggle. But I'm going to work through it and make the best of the experience. So I'm really excited."