He’s been accepted to 122 colleges with $5.3 million in scholarships. His choice came down to his love of music

Helms Ategeka, a high school senior in Oakland, California, received admissions to 122 colleges and universities. With almost too many choices, he and his father had to work through their differences about which school he should choose.

Helms Ategeka wants to be a pop star. But when he told his dad he planned to pursue a music degree after his graduation next month from high school, his father wasn’t exactly thrilled. So last fall, the Oakland, California, teenager took a different approach: He started applying to colleges. More than 150 of them. Before long, he got an acceptance letter. Then another. And another. The trickle became a flood until there were 122 of them — along with some $5.3 million in proposed grants and scholarship offers. (CNN has viewed the acceptance letters.) His father says he’s proud of Helms’ 3.94 GPA and had hoped his son would pick a career with financial stability, like medicine or computer technology. Or maybe Helms might follow in his own footsteps as a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of California, Berkeley. But as he watched the mountain of acceptance letters in his son’s room get bigger with every mail delivery, Chris Ategeka’s hope dimmed. The messages on the multicolored envelopes beckoned with undeniable enthusiasm. “You’re in!” one said. “Our family welcomes your family! read another. “He’s so confident that music is what he wants to do, it would be a disservice for me to try to guide him otherwise … that’s why he applied to a gazillion colleges to prove a point,” Ategeka says. “I told him, ‘You want to be a musician? It takes a lot of hard work.’ And his reaction was, I’ll use my determination to do this to show you how hard I can work.”