<p>No one would accuse Ellen Adams of taking the easy way through anything. </p>
<p>When she was in middle school in Spokane, Wash., she decided that the local high schools wouldn’t present enough of a challenge. She said she chose the Thacher School, a prestigious college preparatory school in Ojai, because “it sounded like a great adventure.” </p>
<p>After she graduated from Thacher with honors, she spent a year in Spain at the University of Granada. </p>
<p>Now 19, Adams will start her first year at Princeton University in the fall. Again, she chose the school in part for the challenge; Princeton has a rare senior thesis program for undergraduates. </p>
<p>Along the way, Adams ran into a whole new set of challenges that she hadn’t sought out. During her senior year at Thacher, she told her parents that she was bisexual, and they stopped supporting her, financially and otherwise, she said. To pay for her Princeton education where tuition, room and board are more than $40,000 a year she has won a raft of scholarships. At the top of the list is the Matthew Shepard Point Scholarship, awarded last month to Adams and two other students from a pool of more than 1,300 applicants. </p>
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<p>Adams said she plans to study international relations at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She’ll also study comparative literature in both Spanish and French, and, in her spare time, she might pursue a certificate in fixed-meter poetry. </p>
<p>“I would love to be a writer, but it’s always good to have a fall-back plan,” she said in a phone interview from a summer camp in northern Idaho, where she’s working as a counselor. </p>
<p>At Thacher, Adams published a few literary 'zines small, do-it-yourself magazines and started a 'zine library on campus. She also started Thacher’s Gay-Straight Alliance club. Many of the other Point Scholars founded similar groups at their high schools, but few had the support that Adams said she enjoyed from teachers, administrators and fellow students. </p>
<p>“It sounds cheesy, but the morals of the school honor, fairness, kindness, truth when they’re put into action, it’s beautiful,” she said. “It made for a very accepting environment. … Compared to some of the horror stories I’ve heard about, I feel very lucky.” </p>
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