This is the last 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 1: A Ticket Out of Poverty
Part 2: Harvard Lags in Community College Recruitment

Kimberly S.M. Woo ’10 is going to be late to her 9 a.m. class—but not because she overslept.

It is 2:30 in the morning, and she has already e-mailed her teaching fellow. Her 5-year-old daughter’s parakeet appears to be dying.

Harvard students might consider themselves experts at juggling schoolwork and extracurricular commitments.

But in addition to a full course load, Woo, a first-year transfer from a community college, works five days a week and commutes to classes from Lexington, Mass.—all while taking care of her 5-year-old daughter, Amarrah.

Meanwhile, Woo’s high school classmates at Phillips Exeter Academy—from which Woo dropped out her junior year—are already working in finance or consulting, having already graduated from college.

After Woo spent nearly six years pulling herself out of homelessness and addiction, her enrollment at Harvard could be seen as her happy ending. But she is still writing her story.

Her social and economic mobility is a double-edged sword. Woo finds herself flirting with the line between advancing her career through education and losing access to the welfare provisions—state-issued food stamps and childcare vouchers—that allow her and her daughter to keep their heads above water.

The executive vice-president of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which awarded Woo a scholarship of up to $30,000 per year, said the challenges Woo faces financially are shared by community college transfers at any school.

“She’s got to support her daughter as well as her education and herself—the struggles that she’s facing in that process are an echo of what is happening to many students,” Joshua Wyner says. He adds that Woo is an exception: “Many of them don’t find a way out of it.”

A DAY IN HER SHOES

Woo wakes at 5:30 every morning, then wakes her daughter and gets her ready for the day. The pair eat breakfast and by 6:45 a.m. is in Woo’s recently acquired ’98 Plymouth Neon. Woo drops Amarrah off at a day-care center in Charlestown.“She’s very, very, almost strangely understanding of the fact that I’m in school,” Woo says.

From Charlestown, Woo takes the T to Harvard Square, rushes to class—which she has scheduled back to back on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays—before changing into khakis and a shirt that is “an ungodly shade of blue” to take the red line downtown to work at the Vitamin Shoppe.

“I don’t know what the majority of students do in terms of work, but I unfortunately have rent to pay, and really need to put in the hours at work,” says Woo, who works there eight to ten hours twice a week and part-time three days a week. “I dedicate a good deal of time that I wish I could study to being at work.”

Woo says she has found financial aid officers, administrators, and professor to be accommodating and compassionate toward her situation, though she says when they find out that she has a child, “there’s this sort of tacit sense of surprise, though they’re supportive of it.”

The economics department, she says, has even allowed Woo to bring her daughter to unit tests, held on weeknights.

FINDING HER PLACE

But Woo says she has found it “much harder to connect” with her classmates than at community college—which she attributes to her age, experience, and living off campus.

“I think I had a dream...of what I wanted [Harvard] to be,” Woo says. “I was terrified of not fitting in, and I think I still get scared of that sometimes.”

Still, Woo has made a few friends: Allison J. La Fave ’10, solicited Woo’s help for an Institute of Politics policy group on the homeless in Massachusetts, La Fave said.

“I have come to realize that people—even if they’re not used to my situation—are very willing to hear about it, to learn about it,” Woo says.

She says has recently become involved with the Asian American Women’s Association (AAWA), which invited her to speak on Friday night in Ticknor Lounge.

Yichen Feng ’10, AAWA’s director of community events, says that Woo’s experiences initially make it difficult to relate to her.

“Being in her situation, it’s really hard for her to integrate—but after we got a chance to talk a bit, she seemed like just another normal person,” Feng says.

The AAWA event came after a long day of work and classes.

On a usual day, Woo takes the train from work back to Charlestown, where she picks up her daughter. The pair drives home.

A closer day-care center is not an option, since Woo depends on state-issued childcare vouchers and food stamps.

The childcare vouchers, she says, are worth $43.50 per day, and Amarrah is there five days a week. The food stamps’ value per month varies depending on her income, but they average around $260, she says.

When they return to the two-story house Woo rents in Lexington—where they moved so that Amarrah could go to a good public school later on—Woo plays and reads with her daughter until 7 or 8 p.m.

Then, Amarrah goes to bed and Woo begins five or six hours of studying—or, sometimes, holding a funeral for her daughter’s bird.

Woo recognizes that she has had to let some things go.

“When you decide to have a kid at 18, you sacrifice your social life, especially when you decide to go to Harvard,” Woo laughs. “Once in awhile, I get to watch TV at night.”

PAY IT FORWARD

Woo is enrolled in Sociology 128: “Models of Social Science Research”; Moral Reasoning 78: “Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory”; Social Analysis 10: “Principles of Economics”; and Religion 1081: “Women and Religion.” She hopes to pursue a concentration in sociology and a secondary field in economics.

“I find ways to sacrifice things that aren’t as important,” Woo says. “There’s a recognition that a reading might not get done as thoroughly because I need to read her a bedtime story.”

Woo dreams of attending the Kennedy School of Government and the Law School to obtain a joint masters degree in public policy and a J.D.

“I want to be in an arena where I can advocate for change,” Woo says, adding that she wants to be in a position to write policy.

Even now, Woo is working to improve the situation of others who have faced homelessness and poverty.

She speaks in public about her experiences, often through One Family Scholars, an organization that helps homeless or formerly homeless women use education to surmount poverty.

Woo faces the added challenge of improving her job prospects while knowing that accepting one of these careers could strip her family of the welfare provisions—foodstamps and childcare vouchers—that she and her daughter depend on.

At a conference in Washington D.C. this October, she discussed the difficulties of this very balance with audience members.

“We are stuck in a system that tells us to find jobs, to ‘better’ ourselves,” Woo told the audience. “But we cannot possibly get better when that very system is perpetuating the problem.”

Woo and her daughter continue to live their lives “on a seesaw in motion,” she says, sitting in the Science Center with her daughter.

“I want to go to Harvard now,” Amarrah proclaims as she puts away her crayons, getting ready to leave.

Woo says, stroking her daughter’s hair, that she simply wishes for her Amarrah “a path that’s a little more stable than the one I took.”

But Woo does not yet know what that path is. Finding a daily balance is hard enough.

After the year’s first snowfall, Woo had to choose whether to tear herself from preparing for a Social Analysis 10 midterm to play outside with her daughter who wanted to build a snowman, or disappoint her. She went outside.

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