This is the first article in a three-part series about formerly homeless mother Kimberly S.M. Woo '10 and other transfer students from community colleges called "The Road Less Traveled."
Part 2: Harvard Lags in Community College Recruitment
Part 3: Mixed Blessings for Student Mother

It was an August day in 2007, and the mailbox was empty again.

Kimberly S.M. Woo ’10 had checked her mail every day that summer for a letter that could change the course of her life.

While the completion of a four-year college degree may serve to further career aspirations or satisfy the wills of parents for many students, Woo’s pursuit of education served a different purpose—to pull her out of poverty and create a future for her and her five-year-old daughter, Amarrah.

Woo applied to Harvard as a transfer student after graduating from community college, making her a minority even among the small Harvard transfer population.

The journey that would bring the 24-year-old Woo through the gates of Harvard Yard—after she survived addiction and homelessness—would be a rarity among her peers.

A ROCKY START

Woo, whose parents are Chinese and caucasian, grew up lower middle-class in Manchester, N.H. Her mother was a pre-school teacher and her father worked in retail.

When she was in middle school, Woo already knew she wanted a quality education. She won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in eighth grade and attended the boarding school until her junior year, when the stress of finding her place in a wealthy world—a K-Mart brand-clad teenager bobbing in a sea of students in J-Crew and Northface—led her to drugs.

“I did pretty well academically, but socially, it was just was a mess,” Woo said. “I struggled really, really badly with the disparity in wealth there. I was not at all prepared I think for the cultural divide between the background I came from and the amount of wealth at the school.”

At that point, suffering from addiction to cocaine and other stimulants such as methamphetamine, Woo dropped out of school, moved in with acquaintances in Manchester, and fell deeper into meth addiction.

It was then that Woo met Amarrah’s father through a mutual friend. He came to Woo’s apartment with nowhere to live and moved in two days later.

The relationship between them was “very violent,” she said. After beating Woo badly enough to send her to the hospital with two black eyes, a fractured cheekbone and ribs, and a concussion, the boyfriend moved to Boston.

When Woo came back from the hospital, she found a notice threatening her with eviction from her apartment. She decided to come to Boston as well, but did not move in with Amarrah’s father at first. Six months later, she said she had stopped taking any drugs.

“I remained homeless until I was 18; no one would take me because I was a minor,” Woo said, recalling nights she spent on the “crack slab” on Newbury Street.

When Woo turned 18, she moved in with the abusive boyfriend and shortly thereafter got pregnant. But the physical abuse continued, she said—and escalated.

A year and a half after Amarrah was born, Woo’s boyfriend was arrested for domestic abuse and assault with a deadly weapon—he had thrown a changing table at Woo and her daughter after a fight, Woo said. The case was dismissed short of conviction, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office.

Destitute, Woo began to look to education as a means to escape.

“We were pretty much on the brink of homelessness for quite awhile there until I had gotten on welfare, gotten on foodstamps, and signed myself on for a year in Americorps,” Woo said.

Woo coordinated a literacy program for students in kindergarten through eighth grade at a public school in Roxbury for Americorps to beef up her employment history.

RISING FROM THE ASHES

After her year with Americorps, Woo, then 21, began taking the train from her Lexington apartment to Bunker Hill Community College, using funding from One Family Scholars, which provides homeless or formerly homeless women with scholarships to use education as a path out of poverty.

Bunker Hill, with many other student mothers, provided Woo with something of a social support system, she said.

Balancing school work, her daughter’s needs, and three jobs—one at the Vitamin Shoppe, one tutoring at Bunker Hill, and one in the Office of Institutional Advancement at Bunker Hill—was difficult. But Woo came up with “creative coping methods” to spend time with her daughter while she wrote papers and did reading, creating assignments for Amarrah so they could work together.

“It was definitely a struggle to try to find a balance between being a good mother and being able to accomplish what I needed to at school,” Woo said, her youthful appearance belying the difficulties of her life. She speaks energetically, flashing a dimpled smile.

Two years later, Woo graduated with a 4.0 GPA and a degree in sociology. But her educational aspirations stretched further—she applied to Harvard, Boston College, Boston University, Simmons College, and the University of Massachusetts.

“There was definitely a consensus that it was absolutely ridiculous that I was applying to Harvard—community college kids don’t go to Harvard,” Woo said.

“Since I was a little kid I wanted to be here—this was my place, where I wanted to learn,” Woo said.

Though Harvard had come to a college fair at Bunker Hill, Woo’s decision to apply was motivated entirely by her long-held goal, she said. She had walked around campus on her own, but never took an official campus tour, since she knew it “wouldn’t be a big determining factor.”

CLIMBING THE IVORY TOWER

Here in a Science Center classroom, Amarrah sits beside Woo—tossing her shoulder-length brown hair, drawing an ice cream cone with sprinkles, and chiming in with questions and occasional commentary.

For Woo, the application process was complicated by the fact that she had a child.

“It’s hard to even know when you’re applying with a child if you’re supposed to acknowledge the fact that you have a child,” Woo said. “It sets you so outside the league of the majority that you don’t know if it’s going to be a positive or a detriment.”

Woo said she “disclosed pretty openly [her] history” in her application essay, as she felt that she was “in a position where [her] academic background merits a lot of explaining.”

“I wanted to fill in some of the areas about why I had wanted to come to Harvard and why I thought I could handle the rigor of it now, when I couldn’t before,” she said, referring to her withdrawal from Phillips Exeter.

When admissions decisions came back in April, Woo said she found that she had been wait-listed at Harvard but was accepted to her second-choice school, Boston University.

“I rallied like hell to get in,” Woo said. “Anyone I knew who had any status, I had writing in.”

In June, she found out that she had received the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation scholarship, which provides up to $30,000 a year to community college students who are seeking a degree at a four-year university. The scholarship now contributes in part to her Harvard financial aid package.

After going through the enrollment processes for BU, Woo said she found out in mid-August that she had been accepted to Harvard—after a neighbor hand-delivered her acceptance letter, which had been dropped off to a house across the street.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited,” Woo said. “It really did feel like a dream come true.”

Yet the realization of this dream is still, in many ways, just the beginning. The educational achievements Woo has worked so hard to obtain may put in jeopardy the welfare provisions she and her daughter need to survive.

—Staff writer Aditi Balakrishna can be reached at balakris@fas.harvard.