The Bridge to Brilliance

When a 13 year old told photographer Brandon Stanton that his principal, Ms. Lopez, was the person who most influenced his life, it started a lucky landslide for Nadia Lopez and her small, public school in one of Brooklyn's most wretched communities. The posting on Stanton's wildly popular site Humans of New York went viral. Lopez found herself in the national spotlight and headed for a meeting with Obama, as well as the beneficiary of a million-dollar IndieGoGo campaign for the school. Here is her first-person account of what it took to get to that moment.