An ongoing series about how and why I persisted in college
When I think about persisting in college, I honestly feel like my story is pretty generic with a high dose of privilege. I persisted. Four years and done. The end. In fact, there was never a doubt in my mind that I would graduate. There was never any other thought or option I’d considered except to go to college, get my degree in graphic design and then become the editor of a magazine in New York City. Wait. I guess that last part didn’t happen. There was no New York City. Turns out me and big cities don’t really get along. But about that college graduation part ... I persisted. This had me wondering if my persistence was a nature versus nature argument. What caused me to persist? My privilege of coming from a white, middle-class family with two master’s degree level parents surely wasn’t the only reason for my persistence. My own brother started and stopped and started before graduating. There were college students far more privileged than I was that squandered their opportunities and never finished. As I reflected on this, I guess I would have to say it was a little bit of both.
Not long ago, I unearthed my mom’s thesis project for her Master’s in Education and Secondary Reading. It’s a sturdy 260-page typewritten "paper," bound together with gold cardstock, and stamped with a silver Wayne State University emblem on the front. Did I mention it was typewritten? I’m sure she used her share of White-Out because there was no delete button on that typewriter. What made this find extra special was that I honestly thought I had thrown it away. I had visions of throwing away so many “unnecessary” items after my mom died and just assumed in my grief and obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I tossed it. So here I was digging through what was left of her mementos in search of family history clues for my own graduate school project and buried at the bottom of a box was this golden nugget of family history.
And yes, I immediately started bawling.
Here’s a little history about my mom which I believe ties into my persistence. Born and raised in the poorer manufacturing neighborhoods of southwest Detroit, Nancy Jean Minor Bankhead earned a grant her senior year of high school that opened the door to a college education. In essence, the grant would pay for her education at Wayne State University in Detroit if she worked a certain number of years as a teacher in the Detroit Public School system after she graduated. She ended up working in the Detroit Public Schools for 33 years! I think the grant givers got more than their money’s worth. My mom was one of 6 kids cared for by their widowed mom living off social security. College wasn’t in her future if not for this grant.
My mom ended up finding her way out of poverty through education and she taught her kids (my brother and I, and her students) to value education too. She was an esteemed teacher in the Detroit Public School system as a high school English teacher and reading specialist and won teacher of the year through the Michigan Reading Association. When we moved away from Detroit, her commute would often be one and a half to two hours long, sometimes three in the Michigan winters, and yet she persisted. When she would begin to grow tired that's when she'd randomly run into a former student who would say, Ms. Bankhead, you're the reason I made it out. She stayed for the Detroit teens in hopes they too would make it out of poverty and onto a better life. And I like to think many did because of her influence. She died at 58, three years after she retired, but her feisty grit, love, and perseverance live on in all those who persevered and persisted, including me.
On the other side, my dad was blue-collar to the roots. He left Waco, Texas for the Navy during the Vietnam War and when his time was up, he moved to Detroit. He worked at a few manufacturing jobs before realizing he didn’t want to do that for the rest of his life. While working full time he made good use of the GI Bill and got his bachelor’s from Wayne State. The two Wayne Staters met and fell in love. My dad moved up the ranks in GM from the assembly line to repossessing cars to becoming solidly white-collar when he earned his degree.
I think my dad’s blue-collar roots and my mom’s history with poverty shaped how they raised my brother and I. They experienced the value of education in their own lives and imparted those values onto us. At the same time, stubbornness and persistence run deep in the genetics of both the Minors and the Bankheads. So while nurture had a big part in my desire to have a college education, nature made sure it happened succinctly, and that I persisted to the end without pause. I knew from the time I was invited to be part of the high school yearbook staff as a freshman that I wanted to be a graphic designer. One geared specifically towards journalism and magazine. By my senior year of high school, I was the design editor of my high school yearbook. I had attended journalism camps, won awards for creative spreads, and fell more in love with design and leadership. I was just one of those people who knew what she wanted to do and the path to take to make it happen. I had spent two weeks at a journalism camp at Ball State the summer going into my senior year of high school, and since I was more than ready to get out of my small one-stoplight town, heading 4 hours south to Indiana seemed like the perfect fit.
Of course, there’s more to the story of why I persisted to get my bachelor’s degree in four years, but I felt like I needed to honor the roots of my persistence because it feels like the core of who I am was always determined to persist.
Read on: Persistence 2 • Persistence 3
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