_______________

Treading An Uneasy Path:

The Road From High School Dropout to Ph.D.

By Michael Lavender, Director of External Relations
Photos By Ken Bennett of Wake Forest University

Stephanie Rockett is the poster child for non-traditional Ph.D. students. Eight years ago, she was a high school dropout, well on her way to nowhere, she says. She was hanging with the wrong crowd, getting into mischief and doing things she knew she shouldn’t do. Her parents were livid, especially her dad.

Over the course of a few months, she had dropped out of everything that was important to her- chiefly school, band, golf, and softball. Instead, she partied. “What else was there to do? You’re not in school,” she said rhetorically.

“Things got so bad at home that I actually got kicked out of my house. I was with a bunch of other people that didn’t care and had dropped out of school... I wasn’t really allowed back in my house until I got serious about doing something besides sleeping all day.”


(Copyright: WFU/ Ken Bennett)

Today, Stephanie is completing her first year in a Ph.D. program in Analytical Chemistry at Wake Forest University, consistently ranked as one of the most competitive and prestigious schools in the United States.

Teenage Angst

Rockett’s insight into issues that may have contributed to her dropout experience and the life-changing events that followed are remarkably keen for someone of her youth, with so little time and distance from those experiences.

At 13, Stephanie left her mother’s home in Charlotte to start a new life with her dad in his hometown of Marion, NC. The Sylva, NC native had spent her early years with her parents in Statesville, NC before her mom and dad divorced when Stephanie was 7 years old. For most of the next six years, she had lived with her mother, who remarried, moved to Gastonia and had three more children besides Stephanie and her younger brother, Jeff. Her mom, a public school teacher, even taught her fourth-grade class.

But as she got older and her mom returned to school, first to earn a master’s degree, and then a doctorate in education, Stephanie began to assume a much larger role in babysitting her younger siblings. To make ends meet, her mother worked two jobs, getting up each morning at 3 a.m. to make breakfast at McDonald’s before changing hats for her day-job at a local elementary school. In the evenings, she had classes of her own... and homework. Stephanie resented her new babysitting role and bolted to her dad’s. That resentment is gone today, replaced with a deep appreciation for her mother’s courage and determination to further her education for the opportunities it can afford.

But depression may have been the proximate cause of her biggest problems, and when she dropped out of school, it only got worse. Unfortunately, she didn’t recognize it at the time, nor did her family. “They assumed everything was fine, but nothing was fine with me. I was so unhappy. I didn’t want to get up, ever, to go to school. I just lost interest in everything,” she said, still somewhat red-faced and embarrassed. “They tried to get me to do stuff, but I wouldn’t.”

After she had dropped out of marching band and sports, she even transferred to a high school in neighboring Morganton, NC before eventually trying a brief stint of home-schooling with her dad, a disabled Vietnam Vet and graduate of Western Carolina University. Around the spring of 2001, she studied for her G.E.D., passing it in just a couple of months, which is atypically fast. It wasn’t her choice to take the test; her mother wouldn’t let her take a trip to visit her boyfriend until she took it.

Several months later, she made an initial attempt to return to school that left her family completely disgusted with her lack of effort. She enrolled at neighboring A-B Tech, but admits that she still wasn’t interested in school and quit going to class. She left home each morning with her bookbag and a nod to her dad, only to ditch school to be with her friends. She made “F’s” that semester. She struggled to figure out who she was. “I tried. I was really trying to figure it out, but I didn’t have it figured out.”

“And then they finally gave up on me,” she said, as if swallowing a bitter pill. More importantly, they cut her off financially, trying to force her hand. A few nights she even slept outside after she was kicked out of her house. She finally had to get a job cleaning rooms at the local Hampton Inn. It was hard, physical labor for the slight-framed Rockett. She hated it. Later, she got a higher paying job at Baxter Healthcare. It was equally hard work, but she liked it much better.

Finding The Road

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could...”

-Robert Frost
“The Road Not Taken”

Self-doubt soon sat in. “You feel like, well...I’m not good enough because I don’t have a regular high school diploma,” Stephanie remembered. Grinning just a bit, she admitted that hard physical labor was also a factor pulling her in the opposite direction. “Hard jobs help to motivate you,” she noted. It was a confusing time.

Finally, “One day I just woke up and realized that nobody I was around was going anywhere in life. And there’s not too much further down that you can go than that....I just had this one moment...one moment,” she said, repeating herself for emphasis, “where I thought, ‘I need to do something.’ I was hanging out with these people that were really bad off, and I was getting to be just like them.” She recognized one subtle difference between herself and her friends, however; “They didn’t even care.” Somewhere deep inside, she knew she could care, even though that hadn’t been evident to her or others for a long time.


(Copyright: WFU/ Ken Bennett)

Describing the event, she searched for just the right words, but came up with few. She had always been a believer and had read her Bible religiously, even when she was hanging with the wrong crowd. Reading the Bible was comforting to her when she was away from her family. As to this turning point-- this eureka-- what caused it? Where did it come from? She had no answers, except that she is certain God has always been watching over her, even at her worst times. And maybe the depression was lifting. Either way, she made a decision to return to school, a decision that would prove to be one of the most important choices she had ever made. “If you have an opportunity to do something, you should try to take it, because someone else would like to have the opportunity and doesn’t. That’s kinda’ how I felt,” she said.

After thinking through a brief plan, she approached her dad about going back to school. He wasn’t hip to the idea. He had just paid back money to the government for the Veteran’s financial assistance she had received while enrolled at A-B Tech, assistance she received for classes she had skipped. But she would need her dad’s blessing to proceed with the plan.

Reluctantly, he agreed to help her apply for financial assistance to go back to school, paving the way for her to enroll.

Unsure Footing: The Plan That Wasn’t

“...Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear...”

-Robert Frost
“The Road Not Taken”

It was a strange new beginning, a process of self-discovery. Even though she had chosen a new path for her life, she had not mapped out her next steps. “I was in school to get a degree, because I was, like, ‘I have to do something with my life.’” She really didn’t know what to major in, but Business sounded good. “I had no idea,” she explained. “I don’t even think I was business savvy anyway.”

But not having a detailed plan may have been an advantage to her, leaving her free to explore new curriculums and more open to sage advice from people she might not otherwise have listened to. She found the first such advice from none other than her major advisor, Max Ledbetter. He encouraged her to go on to a four-year university, where he thought she would major in Business Administration. That was the last thing she had wanted to hear.

“I was, like, I can’t imagine school for two years, much less four... and now it will be nine!,” she laughed at the memory of where she was at then. Her counsel from Ledbetter would be the first of several in her journey and he would continue to suggest a four-year degree during the rest of her time at McDowell Tech. Fortunately, she fell in love with the College, and soon the idea of going to school for four years was not quite so unpleasant.

Paula Bruce, Richard Getty, Ken Nelson and Kelley Crawley quickly became her favorites in the classroom, even though she made her first and only grade of “B” in Crawley’s class. She excelled in Biology, even though it was very hard for her. Unlike most of her classmates who had studied some amount of Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics in high school, she had dropped out of school and felt herself at a disadvantage to her classmates from time-to-time. That made her work even harder to make good grades.

To the degree that she had dropped out and disengaged just a couple of years before, Stephanie became intense and focused in her studies. She changed her major to College Transfer, and continued to work at Baxter Healthcare while she went to school. She was invited to join Phi Theta Kappa, the two-year college honor society.

“I looked forward to learning and pushing myself to higher limits,” she wrote in an email to the College.

Just before finished her degree, she took Mr. Ledbetter’s advice and applied to Western Carolina University, which she entered during the fall of 2005. The transition to Western scared her. She was leaving what had become a comfort zone for her at McDowell Tech. “I felt very prepared academically,” Stephanie said. “The thing I struggled with was the different atmosphere, and moving out on my own.” That was a little stressful. Her family had encouraged her to live in a dorm, but ironically, Stephanie told them, “I’ve done that whole partying thing, and I don’t need that atmosphere.”

While at McDowell Tech Stephanie had begun to identify career interests and was making plans to become a physical therapist. But like most college students, those plans were subject to change. After several volunteer experiences in physical therapy, she found that her 4’11” frame wasn’t well-suited for the physical manipulation required in therapeutic settings, although she cherished the helping aspect of the job.

As she began to think more about the connection between majors and career opportunities, Stephanie chose Chemistry, with a concentration in Biotechnology, as a primary major. Her family thought she was crazy, citing her lack of background in Chemistry. But she had learned over the last couple of years that one of the most important aspects of choosing a degree and a career is finding something you are interested in, something you can be passionate about, and she believed that she would be happy working in a Chemistry-related profession. Because she had anxiety about finding a good job, however, she chose a backup plan by double-majoring in pre-professional Biology.

Coming Into Her Own

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

-Robert Frost
“The Road Not Taken”

Ms. Rockett didn’t tell any of her classmates at Western Carolina that she was a high school dropout until she had almost completed her degree. By then, she was feeling more confident and proud of herself. Nevertheless, she was being teased by some classmates about taking a little longer to catch onto a concept or two in one of her Chemistry classes. Finally, she told them about her dropout experience and reminded them of how many high school and junior level college classes they had taken in Chemistry that she had not been able to take. “It made me happier as a person when I could finally say, ‘I have shortcomings--that’s me--and I’m sorry if it takes me an extra two minutes to understand some concept. I feel like I’m backtracking a little bit. I admit it; I’m a little slow. So I missed a little bit of foundation work, but what I lack, I make up for in other areas. I make up for it in my drive and my will to do something with my life.’” Telling them that was a cathartic experience and you could feel the passion in her voice as she recounted it. She had found some of her stride.

(Copyright: WFU/ Ken Bennett)

A couple of her professors were well aware of her abilities, notwithstanding her tendency to take her time learning material. Like Ledbetter at McDowell Tech, they pushed her to go on to graduate school. Dr. Scott Huffman and Dr. William Kwochka frequently double-teamed her with praise and encouragement. Dr. Kwochka was instrumental in helping her secure a summer research position at West Virginia University, which all but assured her of an offer to attend graduate school there.

When her dad picked her up at the end of the summer, he, too, began to apply the pressure. Her experience at West Virginia had been pretty intense and her feelings were a bit raw. “I told him, ‘No, you go on to school. It’s not fun. I’m not going.”

But as she has come to terms with who she is as a person, she realizes that transition times in her life sometimes stress her and that it is people like Ledbetter, Kwochka, Huffman and her dad who give her the courage she needs to make key decisions in her life. “Really, where I’ve ended up has to do with people like that,” she says. “It just seems to work out that way.” They open her eyes to new possibilities and opportunities.

To be sure, she pushes herself academically. “You grow from it, but it’s so uncomfortable and awful. But afterwards, you realize it’s not that bad and it gets easier to do the next time.”

She took things to the next level when she applied and was accepted for mid-year entry to the Ph.D. program in Analytical Chemistry at Wake Forest University last fall. She was accepted at Clemson University and the University of South Carolina as well, but Wake Forest was her first choice. This time, it was an easy decision.

She started at Wake Forest last January. It has been a totally different experience from what she experienced at McDowell Tech and Western Carolina University. She is enjoying the challenges of teaching a freshman Chemistry lab as a teaching assistant, although it was awkward and intimidating at first. The “TA” position helps cover some of her expenses, although she is on a full tuition scholarship as well.

If you want to see Stephanie in her element, ask her what she is doing in the lab these days. “We’re working with a virus, labeling proteins in the virus with flourescent dyes using capillary electrophoresis, the CE. Although you can use other instruments, this is the instrument we are interested in right now. Specifically, what I’m doing is trying to find the binding constant between a flourescent dye, which is red 1c, and the turnip-yellow mosaic virus. The reason that is important,” she said, “is because if we can find out which dye binds better, how well it binds, we can develop a better method to quantify these proteins, or to pull them out, or to be able to isolate them in a sample. Proteins are hard to detect. You have to label them. They don’t fluoresce and absorb, naturally, or they shouldn’t. I look at the differences between the dye and the protein complex. Through a lot of mathematical calculations, I’ll find the numbers I need.” As the project continues, their research goal, she said, is to develop a methodology that will eventually allow then to analyze soil and water samples for viruses and bacteria. The project has implications for homeland security, environmental engineering and forensics.

Rockett is excited by the opportunity to work on diverse and challenging research projects. Some of her classmates are working in the area of Neuroscience, cancer research, oceanography and homeland security. In future years, she will focus more on research and less on teaching as she completes her own research and papers, begins her dissertation and prepares for professional conferences. The doctoral program will take her approximately five years to complete. During that time, she is already looking at possible research travel opportunities: Japan, Puerto Rico and ocean cruises. “It’s really cool stuff, in cool cities, and I don’t have to be a geek all of the time.”

Stephanie hopes to eventually get her foot in the door in a corporate setting, whether that is with a pharmaceutical company, environmental firm, forensics laboratory, homeland security, or somewhere else. She’d love to travel while she is still young and doesn’t have children. “I have a plan not to really have set plan; that’s my plan,” she laughed.

It’s a fitting plan. Let it take you where it will. To paraphrase Ralph Kramden, “To the moon, Stephanie Rockett; to the moon!”