Father and Graduate Student

By the time I began doctoral study at the University of Florida, I had already lived several lives.

I had been a foster child, a homeless teenager, a student who failed, a student who graduated early, a young father, a college graduate, and a law student.

Now I was pursuing a Ph.D. in higher education while raising my son.

Graduate school was not always the perfect fit I had imagined. I wanted to become a practitioner and institutional leader, while doctoral education often pushed me toward the language and methods of research. I sometimes struggled to see how the pieces connected.

Eventually, they would.

At the time, however, there were more immediate concerns—like statistics.

Statistics, Jamaican Food, and My Son

Some evenings, my son came to class with me.

There was a Jamaican restaurant on University Avenue in Gainesville that became part of our routine. I would call ahead before class and tell them when we were coming. During the break, I would pick up his food, bring him back to the classroom, set him up in the back, and return to trying to survive statistics.

My professor was not interested in making that survival easy. We were doing sums of squares without calculators.

My son ate Jamaican food and watched his father suffer.

It was, in its own way, a wonderful time.

He played YMCA sports. He spent time around a university. He saw classrooms, professors, books, and graduate students as ordinary parts of life.

I wanted education to feel natural to him in a way that it had never felt inevitable for me.

Years earlier, I had been the child sleeping wherever someone allowed me to stay.

Now I was a father trying to make certain that my son understood that he belonged in places of learning.

Where This Part of the Story Ends

By the end of 2007, my life looked very different from the one I had imagined as a teenager in Harlem.

I was a law graduate.

I was pursuing a doctorate at the University of Florida.

And, most importantly, I was raising my son.

I did not yet know how difficult the years ahead would become.

But at the end of 2007, I still believed I was building something.

A career.

A family.

A future.

And for the first time in my life, I had begun to understand that everything I had survived might eventually have a purpose—not because suffering itself is noble, but because I could use what I had learned from it to make institutions better for the students who came after me.

The Story Continues

This is where I am choosing to pause my story—for now.

By the end of 2007, I had traveled a long way from the child I had been in Harlem. I had survived instability, foster care, homelessness, hunger, academic failure, and the uncertainty of entering adulthood without the kind of guidance many people take for granted.

I had also discovered education.

Not as a simple success story. My relationship with education has never been simple. Institutions sometimes opened doors for me, and sometimes they placed obstacles in front of me. Individual educators sometimes changed my life, while other people in positions to help did not.

Those contradictions would shape everything that came next.

The next part of my story follows my transition from student to higher education professional: working with college students, confronting questions of discipline and equity, mentoring young people, studying the systems that influence educational opportunity, and eventually earning my doctorate.

It also follows a journey beyond the United States—one that would eventually lead me to classrooms and communities in Colombia and to a new understanding of what it means to make a home.

There are other chapters too. Some are professional. Some are personal. Some involve experiences I am not yet ready to tell publicly.

I have learned that telling your story does not require telling every part of it at once.

So this is not the end.

It is simply where I am placing the bookmark.

When I am ready, the story will continue.