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FYI Online

      
July 2004

Inside This Issue

Seeing the World: Fulbright Scholars at UMUC

UMUC’s Fulbright Honor Roll

Focus on Faculty: Vinod Jain

Commencement
2004 Stanley J. Drazek Teaching Excellence Award Recipients
Third 2004 Asia Commencement in Okinawa Brings Season to a Close
Arden Wins President’s Medal
Grodsky, Graduate School Founder, Wins Presidents Medal
Student Speaker Says, “You Are Looking at a Miracle.”

Featuring Students: Fred Rahmanian Tackles the Black Art of Software Time and Cost Estimation

Featuring Alumni: UMUC Graduate Designs Biometric Tracking System for D.C. Schools

News Updates and Briefs

UMUC's Online Publications

Commencement 2004

Student Speaker Says, “You Are Looking at a Miracle.”

By Greg Rosenthal
Special to FYI Online

Gwendolyn Washington  

Gwendolyn Washington

 

When Gwendolyn Washington sat down to complete her student speaker application for UMUC’s 2004 commencement ceremony, the words just flowed.

“This was my story and I was going to tell it,” said Washington, a resident of Upper Marlboro, Maryland. “There was never a second thought. And it didn’t take me a long time to tell it.” The story so moved UMUC officials that they selected Washington as the student speaker, allowing her to share her remarkable life with her graduating class, many of whom overcame similar struggles on the road to graduation.

Washington’s story contained no happy beginning. Born in Selma, Alabama, to teenage parents, Washington was fortunate to fall under the motherly eye of a widowed neighbor.

“She saw my sister and I were being neglected,” Washington said. “So she invited us both to come to her second home in Washington, D.C., one summer. That was when my parents abandoned us.”

The neighbor, who was raising four children already, simply welcomed both girls as her own “out of the goodness of her heart,” Washington said, and became Washington’s stand-in parent.

“My mom who raised me was a teacher, a college graduate,” Washington said. “She wanted me to get a degree.”

But at 17, Washington’s life took an unexpected turn. “I became a teenage mother, and that derailed my plans,” she said.

Washington, now 40, became a secretary to support her child, beginning a career that has spanned 20 years. She later married and had two more children, a boy and a girl—now 15 and 7—but eventually divorced.

Burdened with the responsibilities of a job and family, a college education seemed impossible, she said, until she began talking to some colleagues who were UMUC graduates. They told her how to earn a degree without stepping into a classroom. “And from there I went to the Web,” Washington said.

Despite the convenience of Internet classes, school, work, and family still left her with little leisure time. “I’ve been in school since 1998,” she said. “I don’t have any hobbies other than reading textbooks and being with my children.”

Still, like a satisfying story should, Washington’s tale ended happily.

“I felt like the graduation itself and being chosen as the student speaker was beyond anything I could have dreamed,” she said.

Cynthia Davis, associate dean of Academic Affairs in UMUC’s School of Undergraduate Studies, chaired the student speaker selection committee.

“[Washington] had a wonderful message,” Davis said. “When student speakers audition, we look for a message that connects with all students. We were really struck by the nature of her story and how, although it was a very personal story, it was in some way typical of UMUC students.”

Like many of her classmates, Washington saw her seemingly impossible dream of completing a degree become reality.

“You are looking at a miracle,” she said during her speech, “and UMUC is the catalyst that helped create this miracle.” She went on to encourage her classmates to tell others of their success. “You can be that spark that will let them know that they can change their lives and continue their education.”

Following her own advice, Washington re-enrolled at UMUC, where she is currently working toward her MBA.

        
      
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