By: Tiara Davis
There is a version of me from 2012 who would not recognize the woman writing this. That version walked away from Joliet Junior College, and did not set foot in a classroom again for more than a decade. She was 18, pregnant, and told by a doctor that she was depressed. In my house, that word did not exist. Depression was not a diagnosis; it was something you slept off. So, I did not get help. I got quiet, and I got gone.
I tell people now that I returned to school in 2023, but the truth is school found me at Kennedy-King College during a resource fair I was trying to walk past. A program coordinator named Jonathan Talley stopped me, asked my name, and would not let me disappear into the hallway the way I planned to. I wanted to keep my head down, finish what I hadn’t finished the first time, and leave. He had other plans. That conversation connected me to One Million Degrees, and it changed the shape of the next two years of my life.
I was raised by my nana on the South Side of Chicago, and when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, I became her sole caregiver. From 2023 until she passed in February 2025, my focus was on my grandmother and my three children.
The hardest part was never the academic material. It was the guilt. It was watching my middle daughter, who suffers from asthma, on a breathing machine while my laptop stayed open beside her, and wondering if there was more I should be doing as a mother to speed up her healing process. It took time to understand that finishing the degree was not a betrayal of my children; it was my purpose. I was trying to bring them along on a journey instead of disappearing into one, and some days that meant doing laundry, cooking dinner, and helping with their homework after I had already spent the day doing mine.
I say all of this because I am not the only one living it. There is an entire population of students walking around campus who are not 18, who are not carrying a backpack because it is trendy, but because it is the only bag big enough to hold a laptop, a snack for their kid, and a folder of medical paperwork. Higher education needs to see us.
It starts with an acknowledgment. Orientation speeches are written for eighteen-year-olds fresh out of high school, and that is not wrong, but there are 33-year-old returning mothers sitting in that same auditorium who need to hear that their sleepless nights and slower pace are expected, not shameful. Kennedy-King had something I will never forget: a market on campus, stocked with produce, meat, frozen meals, real groceries—not a food pantry box handed to you at the door. You picked your own cart and chose what your family needed. That is dignity, and it is also time. Every hour I did not spend in a grocery store was an hour I spent on campus, or with my kids, or asleep.
Colleges also have to fund the mental health support that keeps students like me from disappearing the way I did in 2012. The voices that tell you your window has closed are loud. Somebody has to hand you a louder microphone.
I am headed to the Illinois Institute of Technology on a full scholarship, working toward my bachelor’s degree in information technology. I know that a master’s degree in data science will follow shortly after. I want to build policy around artificial intelligence, because bias does not disappear just because a human is no longer the one making the decision. Someone has to be in the room when the algorithm decides who gets the loan, the apartment, or the job. I intend to be the person in that room.
I am not a symbol of overcoming. I am still in it. But I am also proof that a window you thought had closed can still be pried back open, sometimes by a stranger at a folding table who refuses to let you walk past.
