Comcast scholar: Comcast’s Steve Hackley and NECN anchor Latoyia Edwards celebrated with Dorchester’s Marianna McNeil, winner of a surprise scholarship. Bill Brett photo

Codman Square resident Marianna McNeil was treated to quite the surprise on June 23 when she was selected to receive a $10,000 Comcast Founders Scholarship as part of the Comcast Foundation’s annual Leaders and Achievers Scholarship Program.

McNeil, 19, along with 111 other students from across the Commonwealth, had arrived at the State House to accept $1,000 scholarships from the Leaders and Achievers Scholarship Program. For McNeil, who graduated from the Boston Day and Evening Academy in June, the scholarship was the result of late nights at school tweaking her essay.

“My post-graduate planner knew I was big into scholarships and that I wanted to prove to my family that I could go to college on my own. She told me to apply to the Comcast scholarship, and I’d stay at her office till 8 p.m. to work on the essay,” she said.

Only one student out of the 112 is selected to receive the $10,000 Comcast Founders Scholarship, instituted in honor of Ralph J. Roberts, Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Comcast Corporation.

McNeil, who will be attending Wheelock College in the fall as a commuter, would like to be able to live on campus, and saw the possible $10,000 as a step towards that goal.

“When they told me that a surprise student would get 10,000 I said, ‘Wow that’s a lot of money,’” she said. “I am a woman of faith, so I prayed.”

When it was announced that the winner was involved with Project HIP HOP, a youth organization that Marianna is heavily involved in, she realized she was about to receive the surprise scholarship.

“When they announced that the student was involved with Project HIP HOP, I felt chills from my ankles to my brain, it was an amazing feeling. I was in a state of shock,” she said. “I had just graduated high school, and had received two other scholarships, and to receive another this large was amazing.”

The road to this scholarship has not been an easy one for McNeil. The summer before she matriculated to the Boston Day and Evening Academy from the Urban Science Academy in West Roxbury in 2013, McNeil was in Washington D.C. with Project HIP HOP for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. The day the group was to perform for the President, she received news that her grandmother, who she had been living with, had passed away, rendering McNeil homeless.

With her mother and siblings in shelters, McNeil moved in with Project HIP HOP’s director before being placed in a home through Boston Day and Evening Academy’s Youth Harbors program, which provides housing for homeless students pursuing their high school diploma.

Currently, McNeil lives in Codman Square with her mother and siblings.

“Our relationship has blossomed because I proved to my mom, who was a high school drop out after she got pregnant with me, that could graduate high school and go to college. I want to show my parents that they can have a legacy attached to their names,” she said.