Murray and her older sister grew up in a dingy apartment with their parents—both drug addicts—and attended various public schools through eighth grade.

Raised in a family marked by generations of violence and instability, Murray remembers her mother pawning the family’s possessions for drugs, then shooting up in the living room with her father.

Murray did well in school but was arrested for truancy several times before the AIDS-related death of her mother in 1996 inspired her to take her education more seriously.

“I had been through the mainstream school system, schools where you fall through the cracks,” Murray says. “I had just lost faith in the school system.”

Although many high schools denied her entrance because she was truant, in 1997 Murray enrolled at the Humanities Preparatory School, a new progressive public school in downtown Manhattan.

Murray completed high school in two years, all while living on the street—rather than with an abusive grandfather who housed her sister—and occasionally spending the night with friends or in the subway.

Murray soon rose to the top of her class and was encouraged by the staff at Humanities Prep to go to college.

“I just felt like so many things had gone wrong, I had been denied so many opportunities,” Murray says. “I had to pull myself out of where I was if I was going to move up.”

Murray applied for several scholarships, and her story attracted the attention of the New York Times Scholarship Program, a fund which gives students who have overcome great obstacles in their lives the opportunity to attend top-tier universities.

Staff members at the then-fledgling program took Murray under their wing, steering her through the college application process and taking care of basic needs that had been neglected in her years on the street.

“I hadn’t had dental work since I was eight. They took me to the dentist’s, and took care of everything,” Murray says of the scholarship program, which currently supports 100 students in colleges across the country, including several at Harvard. “They really step in and make sure that everything is all right.”

Murray’s matriculation at Harvard was somewhat blind, she says. Her school of choice had been Brown University, but she was rejected.

“If I had gotten into both [Harvard and Brown], I would have come to Harvard, just because it was Harvard,” Murray adds.

Murray graduated from Humanities Prep in the spring of 1999, but then took a year off of school to work at the Times, where she read submissions for the Magazine’s Lives section and wrote several short news articles.

Before beginning her first year at Harvard, in the fall of 2000, Murray took summer courses at Harvard in expository writing and Shakespeare. “It was a program for people with backgrounds where they feel like you might have problems adjusting,” Murray says.