“Biggest hurdle, probably be the single mom thing because I still have young kids. My oldest will be 18 next year, so that's a big deal, but I'm not going to sit there and depend on her to be babysitter while I go off and do this thing. So that would be the biggest hurdle, figuring out what to do with my babies when the time comes. And then biggest asset is I just don't give up. I don't know how. That is not a word, a phrase that I have ever heard in my life. Do I take a moment when things get rough? Yeah, but that moment is I can honestly say that moment has never been more than 24 hours. I give myself a day. I will give myself a day to wallow in self-pity and then I'll get back on it…But yeah, so all that to say is like, I'll give myself a day and obviously sometimes less and then I just pick it back up and just keep going…You got to have it. Life has not been easy and that's a whole other story all wrapped up in a whole other time, but my life has not been easy. It's been really hard. And so you got to realize that if you're going to live life, you got to live life the way you want to, and you got to just work hard at it. And whatever's in your ability to do, do it.”
- Jess

"Oh my God, it was so hard. I mean, not for the math part because...I had viewed before. But for my English, Oh my God....for the first year in college, I didn't know what I was doing at all. I wanted to take English classes for second language but my brother didn't allow me to, he told me to take the same classes that everybody takes here and I took them. It was very hard but I didn't quit, and I was actually proud of myself because I ended up having A’s in those classes.”
- Griselda

"Whether subconscious bias or implicit bias that they have, I'm probably just as hardworking, if not more hardworking than the other students in class …I don't know if all professors do that, but I think despite whether or not they're real, I think just whatever you feel about me or people who look like me, we're hardworking. We'll get the job done. Probably work twice as hard than the other people in the class who look more like the professor instead of like me... I think people of color just naturally have to work twice as hard in general because people might see them just looking at them is lazy. They already work twice as hard, but just knowing that the professors…they're like, "Okay, well, I have to work twice as hard," I say that's a microaggression to me…because that's saying, "Oh, you got this far? That's surprising. I'm proud of you." To them, that's a compliment, but to us, it's like, "I work just as hard as anybody else here. Why is that surprising to you?" Especially it hurts because being a Black woman, they could be saying it for multiple reasons the fact that I'm Black and the fact that I'm a woman…You didn't have to say, "Wow, you got here." You could have just said, "I'm proud of you." The first part, it's like, "What is the point of including that in there?"
- Kristy