

Was 3.50, placing her 39th out of 559 students in her graduating class. At Mesquite High, she never had to study for math tests she aced them all without really trying. Failure was not an experience she was used to. She failed her first test in statistics, a prerequisite for admission to the nursing program. And then, a month into the school year, Vanessa stumbled. “But I thought: Oh, I got this far,” Vanessa told me. She was nervous, a little intimidated by the size of the place, but she was also confident that she was finally where she was meant to be. In her head, she saw it like a checklist, and in March 2013, when she received her acceptance letter from U.T., it felt as if she were checking off the first item.įive months later, Vanessa’s parents dropped her off at her dorm in Austin. By the time she was in high school, she had it all planned out: She would make her way through the nursing program at U.T., then get a master’s in anesthesiology, then move back to Dallas, get a good job at a hospital, then help out her parents and start her own family. There were plenty of decent colleges in and around Dallas that Vanessa could have chosen, but she made up her mind back in middle school that she wanted to attend the University of Texas at Austin, the most prestigious public university in the state. Like her mother, Vanessa shone in school, and as she grew up, her parents and her grandparents would often tell her that she would be the one to reach the prize that had slipped away from her mother: a four-year college degree.

Vanessa’s parents divorced when she was 12, and money was always tight, but they raised her and her younger brother to believe they could accomplish anything. She married her high-school boyfriend, and when Vanessa was 9, they moved to Mesquite, a working-class suburb of Dallas, where she worked for a mortgage company. Vanessa’s mom did better than most teenage mothers.
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The image of herself as a college student appealed to her - independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential - but it was more than that it was a chance to rewrite the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving high-school senior in a small town in Arkansas, became pregnant with Vanessa.

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Free Shipping & No Sales Tax.įor as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. Magazine Deals on Just 18 Magazine starting at $29.97.
