She had her first baby when she was 17 and a senior in high school. She had her second when she was 20.Their father was 40 and her boss at her summer job when she met him. She didn’t want to be with him, but ended up marrying him anyway, because she thought it was expected of her. For the next eight years, she tried to figure out how to leave her marriage and go to college. She enrolled in Rogue Community College for the first time when she was 19, but her husband didn’t support her, she didn’t have child care and her grades weren’t as high as she wanted, so she dropped out. “I had convinced myself this was my life,” she said. “This was the choice I had made. I was stuck with it.” Then a therapist helped her see she could make a new choice. In 2019, she went back to college, divorced her husband and moved out of their three-bedroom house and into her parents’ kitchen with her two children. Her husband told her she would find herself incompetent in college. She proved him wrong, getting almost all A’s. When a friend introduced her at school as “Kim, the future surgeon,” she started to believe it was true. In early 2020, her ex-husband told her he was dying of cancer and asked her to take care of him in hospice. She did it for her children, because he was their dad and they loved him. He died in May 2020. She transferred to PSU in fall 2021 with help from the Nancy Ryles Scholarship, an award for students returning to college.The scholarship was created in memory of Nancy Ryles, an Oregon politician who died of brain cancer in 1990 at age 52. She attended college but didn’t graduate and wanted to help other women finish their degrees. The students who apply for the scholarship are “so incredibly determined,” said Martha DeLong, a member of the scholarship steering committee. Like Kinnaman, many applicants have children, and they want to set a good example for them. “They’ve gone through some very tough times in many cases,” DeLong said. “When they leave school, it’s because they don’t believe in themselves. By the time they apply, they realize they can do this, and many want to demonstrate to their kids that they can do it, too.” Kinnaman moved into a one-bedroom apartment near PSU with her two children, now 13 and 11. She’s taking a heavy load of classes and getting good grades. She hopes to go to medical school at Oregon Health & Science University and someday start her own scholarship. “I want to help other people realize their dreams,” she said. “It doesn’t stop with me.” If you’d like to support PSU students returning to school later in life like the ones profiled here, consider giving to the President’s Equal Access Scholarship fund at giving.psuf.org/equalaccess. “When a friend introduced her at school as ‘Kim, the future surgeon,’ she started to believe it was true.” Student Kim Kinnaman at the Robertson Life Sciences Building. Photo by So-Min Kang. 32 // PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz