In Their Own Words: The River That Divided My Childhood—and Shaped My Future

My path to GS is inextricably linked to my family's history. I grew up in a single-parent household near the Mississippi River in south Louisiana. On one side of the river lay economic opportunity and quality education; on the other side, a divided community marked by economic racism and a glaring window into the region's Antebellum past. 

When I was eight, I ran errands with my grandfather, who spent his life as a tenant farmer tending to crops and livestock on the land where our ancestors had labored. He would ask me, "What's this say, son?" pointing at a bill or various labels at the town's drug store. I thought to myself, "he must know that I've been in school long enough to know how to read.” Only later did I realize the disconcerting truth: he asked because he had never learned how to read or write. He needed me there to help him navigate his responsibilities.

The legacy of slavery and its impact on my family is not a distant history. For many Black families who live in the rural South, it's a living inheritance. My grandfather frequently encouraged my mother to leave in search of better opportunities. Her eventual decision to move to the other side of the river gave me access to opportunities that helped shape the course of my life.

I built my childhood identity around academic success because it was the one place I felt truly seen. I cherished reading, which offered me a lens into possibilities that defied the heartbreak of the warring court battles between my parents, where I was often treated as ammunition. We didn't have much, so books and visits to a library in a neighboring city became my early places of exploration.

In middle school, I bonded with my band director, Richard Bresowar, who helped me understand how music can serve as a tool for self-expression and emotional health, and that being male and emotionally expressive was both acceptable and powerful.

I learned to play the trombone and euphonium, and went on to conduct the school's sixth-grade band of several hundred students and place first chair trombone at the district level. Music remained a vital part of my life into high school, where I lettered as a freshman and placed first chair in many district, state, and regional conferences.

At 16, escalating financial tensions between my parents and rising homophobic behavior from my dad led me to pursue legal emancipation. While wisdom has taught me to forgive my parents, recognizing that their struggles were shaped by intergenerational trauma and systemic injustice, no child should be subjected to the isolation that comes from being reduced to a commodity exchanged between adults.

After graduating high school with honors, I enrolled at Louisiana State University. Balancing work, marching band, and an overly ambitious course load proved challenging as an emancipated first-generation college student. I was also struggling silently with an undiagnosed learning disability. Midway through my program, I took a gap year to focus on my mental health. 

I returned to LSU during a time of rising threats to LGBTQ rights. In Baton Rouge, a man was falsely arrested on attempted "crimes against nature," a statute from 1805. Working alongside other LGBTQ leaders, I organized an email campaign supporting a city resolution against the statute. We also negotiated additional commitments to report hate crimes annually. Meanwhile, at LSU, growing concerns about gendered violence toward transgender and non-binary students led us to act. I organized a coalition to pass the first gender-inclusive housing resolution in the state of Louisiana.

While my heart was deeply invested in improving conditions for my community, it came at a cost to my academic performance and post-graduation opportunities. Still, I’ll never forget receiving two letters from former President Barack Obama, or the honor of being nominated by the executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party to run as a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Although I lost my bid by two votes, it was a result that I was both saddened by and grateful for. I knew financing the trip at the time would have been out of reach.

Much like my mother crossed the river to find opportunity, I too chose to journey, but to Sacramento, California. During the pandemic, with the support of my partners, I took multiple leaps of faith toward opportunity. I quit my full-time job, founded a new business focused on managed IT services and technical consulting, and returned to school to pursue a rigorous computer science program at Folsom Lake College. There, I developed a passion for natural language processing (NLP) through a pioneering AI for Future Workforce program supported by Intel. I was inducted into the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society and graduated with honors.

Despite my academic performance, I was devastated to learn that I was excluded from transfer consideration at nearly all University of California campuses because I already had a bachelor's degree. Transfer admission was also prohibited for computer science majors. GS, with its over 75-year history of serving nontraditional students, did not have these biases. The rest is history.

At GS, I’ve pursued my passion for NLP to new heights. Professor Julia Hirschberg was one of my primary motivations for attending Columbia—her pioneering work on dialogue systems, emotional speech synthesis, prosody, and pragmatics places her among the foremost experts in the field, and learning under her has been a life-changing experience. 

One of my proudest achievements is the Black Language Oral Corpus of the South (BLOCS)—a spoken corpus that I curated under the Columbia Speech Lab, comprising approximately 1,000 hours of speech from the Gulf South. It’s critical that the datasets we use to train AI models do not neglect our most vulnerable communities, often overlooked in the pursuit of technological progress. I will continue this work post-graduation at the Columbia School of Engineering, pursuing a masters in computer science. 

People have been at the heart of my GS experience. My academic dean, Lauren Manzino, has been a steady and supportive presence since before I first set foot on campus. Her compassion, along with her detailed emails, have been unmatched across my collegiate experiences at multiple campuses and in various states. Her support has been crucial to my success, especially during the busiest moments. With her guidance, I often felt my questions were answered before I even asked them, and I always had the resources I needed to succeed.

Past experiences have taught me the importance of community. During Jumpstart and NSOP, I quickly connected with my computer science peers and started a network that grew to be 60 of my closest friends and confidants. We supported each other through peer advising, uplifted each other's successes, and communed inside and outside the classroom. These experiences inspired me to serve as an orientation leader myself the following year. In my time with GS Alliance, I led efforts to connect us with local community organizations and partners. More personally, I started volunteering with Publicity Lodge No. 1000 of the Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York. Last November, we served meals to veterans receiving care at the Bronx VA Hospital, an opportunity not available since before the pandemic.

Additionally, my greatest accomplishment at Columbia was a profoundly personal decision to help an incoming queer international student reach Columbia. We connected through a serendipitous conversation on Sidechat, and while as president of GS Alliance, I saw it as my moral imperative to help in any way possible, it was the similarity in our paths and family challenges that united us. I helped him apply for asylum status, and when efforts to raise sufficient financial support for him to go to Columbia through crowdfunding fell short, I cosigned his student loans. I did what I would have wanted my parents to do for me when I was his age. 

Late in life, I learned that my paternal grandmother, a former Head Start teacher, had been deeply involved in civic engagement. She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in peaceful protests for voter rights and was violently arrested and beaten by white police during the struggle against segregation. Though I didn't have much time with her before she passed, her memory has given me the strength to stand up against injustice. At the end of one chapter of my journey, my advice to fellow GSers is to anchor yourself firmly in your values and learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Challenge yourself to grow into whoever you want to become, and you will find that there is a path for you here at GS—and others who will help you along the way.