Oct. 18, 2010
Contact:
Jeremy Craig, 404-413-1357
University Relations
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| Keisha and Iris Parker |
ATLANTA — Keisha Parker left home as a teenager with an overriding wanderlust that took her across the nation, and eventually, into Central America where she worked in a Panamanian orphanage.
The Jasper, Ga., native and applied linguistics major now calls Georgia State University home. With a 3.9 GPA, Parker, 27, will graduate in December, and the Ronald E. McNair Program scholar has her sights set on graduate school and the world.
She’s not a woman of means, is a single mom and has worked long hours to support her daughter. But she’s achieved much in her time at GSU, winning numerous awards for her research, including McNair awards, GSU Undergraduate Research Conference prizes, Language and Literacy grants, and other prizes. She’s also a co-author on her first academic journal article that will be published soon.
“It’s been really great and really challenging,” Parker said. “I just got all of this positive reinforcement and said ‘Wow, I can do this.'”
Her path started in Jasper when she was 15, restless and wanted to travel.
“People think that I must have had horrible parents, but they really were more a victim of me,” Parker said with a smile. “I don’t write that in scholarship essays, and it doesn’t fit a Charles Dickens story. I just really had a fixation with freedom, and I had to go really far. I think I still have it.”
She eventually landed at a community college in Asheville, N.C. After graduation, she headed to Atlanta, where she became involved with the McNair program which is aimed at increasing the number of Ph.D. holders among minority and low income, first-generation college students, who are historically underrepresented in academia.
Embracing different languages — she speaks Spanish, and has started to learn Turkish — she connected with Sara Weigle, chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics, and became enamored with research.
She’s been investigating an English proficiency exam that incoming international students and non-native English speakers must take. Students read a sample text and write essays based on it. Parker initially thought that the students simply copied the information in the reading material, but found that students were doing exactly what the test was set out to do — to have students create essays that were of their own analysis, rather than duplication of the text.
“It really validates these tests,” Parker said. “One of the concerns in the discussions about these exams is that students are going to use all of that text and plagiarize it. I tried to prove that they were doing that, and I saw that they were using the test the way they’re supposed to.
“Students across the board react the same way,” she added. “It speaks volumes for the test creators. They’re very complicated.”
As a single mother, life is not easy. At one point, Parker went to Georgia State for classes in the day, but drove an hour or more from her home in Cobb County to her parents so that her 5-year-old daughter, Iris, could be taken care of. After school, she worked late in the evening.
“I’ve had been so tired that I fell asleep with my shoes on,” she said. “But if you have something you really want and it inspires you, it just keeps you going.”
Parker has taken Iris on her travels, including one trip to Panama to help take care of orphans.
Though she may not have much, compared to those children, she and Iris have much to be thankful for. When she came to the orphanage, those children didn’t have formula, and were eating a mixture of beans and water out of a bottle. Beds were broken. Many were very sick.
Parker used what meager funds she had to bring diapers, formula and medicine to the children, many of whom will never have the opportunity to get an education. She used so much of her funds that she didn’t have any money to pay for the departure tax to get out of the country.
“I realize that compared to the rest of the world, I’m horribly rich,” Parker said. “The more I learn about the world, the more I realize that we’re fortunate to have aid. People need to just use the opportunities they are handed.”
Iris has also come to events on campus, like tea parties where her mother practiced speaking Turkish.
Parker hopes that Iris has picked up a love of learning by being exposed to the university, and through her exposure to the world.
“She’s learned a lot of things that most kids don’t understand,” Parker said. “She’s changed diapers and fed babies at the orphanage. Even though she really can’t grasp it completely, she’s starting to understand that the world is a big place, and that we’re really blessed.
“I want to fill her whole passport before she turns 10,” she said.