I will never forget the day I met Dawn. Jane escorts me to a conference room at Burns High where I am to meet her. With Dawn is Robyn the Burns High Counselor and what I consider an angel on this earth for all she does for Dawn (and others!). Robyn always said that Dawn was her heart child, a child you love but did not have the honor of “raising”. And now I can honestly say that I understand what Robyn meant because now Dawn is my heart child, too. 
My first impression of Dawn was that of a quiet, unimposing, shy girl. I was handed her transcripts and noticed her GPA, class rank and the number of AP courses. Burns was Dawn’s 3rd high school, a fact that did not afford her the opportunity to take as many AP classes or have the top class rank as other kids of her intellect. As a matter of fact, she only had 1 AP course under her belt, AP European History. She was currently enrolled in 3 more AP classes being her senior year. While Robyn, Dawn and I were discussing AP classes, Robyn made the comment that she wasn’t sure why students actually needed to take AP European History. Well, Dawn immediately gave a very well reasoned and insightful answer to that question. I thought, my goodness, she is an intellectual.
Dawn handed me her AP European teacher’s recommendation letter and asked if I would like to read it. I could only get through the first page because I could no longer see to read as the tears were welling up and beginning to fall. Trying very hard to keep it together, I apologized for the emotions in which she responded “this is the part that made me cry”. She turned to the 2nd page of the recommendation and read the part where her teacher said he “so admired Dawn” and I said, “Dawn, EVERYONE admires you.”
Well, within 30 minutes of meeting Dawn, everything collided! As an experienced “senior mom”, the information from our meeting, the stories from the last week, spontaneously, my emotional response to Dawn was identical to the emotional response I had to Partners In Health Founder, Dr. Paul Farmer. In the book written by Tracy Kidder, “Mountains Beyond Mountains”, Kidder tells the story of the obstacles of Paul Farmer’s childhood and his life work helping the poor Haitians afflicted with Tuberculosis and AIDs. Although Kidder stresses that his book was not intended for readers to have “moral envy”, you do and are in complete awe of Farmer’s accomplishments. And I was in awe of Dawn’s accomplishments - accomplishments made in spite of the obstacles of poverty and homelessness. I told Dawn if you tell your story, not only will you get in these colleges, they will be competing for you. Dawn is the kind of student that college admission officers dream about. I told Dawn to “reach for the stars. You seem like someone Harvard would be interested in.” It was totally a gut reaction to suggest such a long shot. Dawn was something special and I believed that anyone who heard her story would be clamoring for her to be a part of their university.
We decided that the NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill applications would be the first applications that Dawn needed to complete and send in since their early decision deadlines were 1 week away. Completing those 2 plus the common application meant Dawn had a lot of work to do and I was ready to be her handy assistant!
