Most students leave for college without a piece of home. But for a set of triplets from Newport Beach, California, they’re getting to take their siblings.
Claire, Christopher and Edward Goul were all accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will start their college careers in the fall.
“From an early age, they showed a real interest in learning about math and science,” their father, Richard Goul, told ABC News. “They all had exceptional teachers, starting in elementary school, that helped them figure out what fields they wanted to pursue.”
Claire plans to study biology, Christopher will go into electrical engineering and Edward wants to do both math and physics.
The 18-year-old triplets went on their first college tours in February of their sophomore year on the East Coast, including a visit to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s when their father said all three of them decided MIT was the goal after high school.
“They were naturally very curious and asking lots of questions about MIT’s cancer research institute,” he said.
The siblings, whom ABC News was unable to reach, took unpaid internships at the school the following summer.
Claire, Christopher and Edward look up to MIT so much partly because their grandfather taught mathematics there in the 1950s, their dad said. “They always knew it was an exceptional institution because of their grandfather,” Richard Goul, 57, said. “He would always tell them math stories and teach them equations growing up.”
Gould, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, attended the University of Southern California and Loyola Law School. His wife, Karen, attended the University of California at Irvine and Loyola Law School and works as a Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney.
Claire, Christopher and Edward are graduating from Sage Hill High School the first week of June.
MIT accepted just 1,467 students for its freshman class, giving them a low acceptance rate of 8 percent, according to a report from the Office of Admissions.
“It’s gratifying to me and my wife because you never know if their hard work will ever pay off,” Goul said. “They made incredible sacrifices growing up by taking the most difficult courses and taking summer courses because they knew what their goals were.”
