Daria Rose of Baldwin Harbor, a Yale Law student, to compete on next 'Bachelor'

Among the women vying for Clayton Echard's heart on "The Bachelor" season 26, premiering Jan. 3, is a highly accomplished Yale Law School student from Baldwin Harbor.

Daria Rose, 24, made headlines internationally in 2015 when, as a student at the all-girls Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead, she won admission to seven Ivy League colleges, in addition to seven others. She eventually chose Harvard, graduating in 2019, and is now in her third year of law school in New Haven, Connecticut. But her heart, her mother says, remains in Baldwin.

"She's proud of where she's from," says Katrina Brooks Rose, 52, an attorney for the Town of Hempstead. "They originally said she was from New Haven" in her capsule biography on ABC's "The Bachelor" website. "And she said, 'No, that's where I go to school. I'm from Baldwin.' They had to take it down and redo it!" Indeed, the ABC media site still lists New Haven.

Daria Rose's academic accomplishments are all the more impressive given that her home was devastated by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012, displacing the family for nearly 1.5 years while the house was being rebuilt. A neighbor's home had "exploded," according to press accounts, setting the Rose home afire.

"We stayed with my mom in the beginning," Brooks Rose says, "and then we stayed in a few hotels for a month and then we finally rented a house in Baldwin, which gave us much more stability." Daria, then a sophomore at Sacred Heart, "was still able to concentrate on her school work. She decided she was going to stay at the school as much as she could, going to the library to read and focus on what she needed to do, since being in a hotel, one room, was difficult. The teachers and the school were very accommodating."

Daria Rose, who was born in Oceanside and raised in Baldwin Harbor, is the daughter of Katrina and Jamaican immigrant Desmond Rose, a supervisor at LIPA. She has a younger brother, Justin, a junior at Cornell University in Ithaca. Among her many community activities while growing up, Daria tutored younger students at Hempstead Public Library and raised money for Operation Smile, an organization that helps provide reconstructive surgery to children who, like her, were born with cleft lips or palates. At Yale, she participated in a program that mentored first-generation, low-income and underrepresented minority students with an interest in law school.

Competing on "The Bachelor" might seem frivolous in comparison, but Brooks Rose says her daughter is "very adventurous, and once the show reached out to her she thought it'd be kind of fun. She's always been the most studious person, and this was something she thought could be a little out of the norm of what she's used to. We just told her, 'If you want to do it, do it and we'll support you.' "