Liz Murray

Liz Murray (born September 23, 1980 in The Bronx, New York) is an American whose success story has spread around the world. She is known for being the homeless girl wandering the slums of New York, who eventually turns her life around once she realizes she is not doomed to experience life on the streets. Determined and confident, she strives for and succeeds at becoming a student at Harvard University. Her story was told in an Emmy-nominated Lifetime TV movie Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story.

Murray, whose life was chronicled in the Lifetime television movie Homeless to Harvard, was the keynote speaker at Bryan's back-to-school convocation at Central Baptist Church.

"The greatest challenge really came not in my circumstances, but in believing in what I did," Murray told more than 6,000 Bryan school employees Friday. "No matter what the circumstances were, I had a choice."

By age 15, Murray's mother had died of AIDS and Liz was homeless - living on the streets, riding on the subway all night, and eating from the dumpsters. While a majority of us would have given up on life, amidst the pain, Murray always imagined the her life could be much better than it was.

"I started to grasp the value of the lessons learned while living on the streets. I knew, after overcoming those daily obstacles, that next to nothing could hold me down."

Determined to take charge of her life, Murray pulled herself together, enrolled in a charter school in New York and completed all four years of high school in just two years. This was all done while Murray was still homeless. At the encouragement of a mentor, she went on to earn a scholarship from the New York Times and entered Harvard University in 2000. Although she began her college career at Harvard, she eventually transferred to Columbia University to be closer to her father who is dying from AIDS.

Murray narrated how she and her older sister had lived in a trash-strewn, filthy apartment in the Bronx. Their parents were drug addicts, and when the welfare check came at the first of each month, the family of four would go to the "drug spot" and her parents would buy cocaine and heroin, Murray said.