The town where I’m from is called Shuqualak. The population is about 500. There is a post office, bank, clinic and furniture store.

On a positive note, the people there are very sweet and everyone is extremely willing to help each other out. The town is very homey and has a very down-home family atmosphere. You can find a fish-fry at someone’s house every weekend. There is little to no crime, because everyone knows who you are and the person that you are committing the crime against. There are now all kinds of intramural teams and you can play almost any sport you want for fun. The county seat is growing and a community development and beautification project is underway. It is becoming a great retirement community.

I am an only child so growing up I stayed pretty bored. There was and still is nothing for young people to do. There weren’t even basketball courts to play on. Most people got in cars and rode around the town for fun.

Both my parents were teachers so they were very careful about who I could be with. Once I got to about middle school, there was no longer anyone in the neighborhood to hang with. My parents sent me to camps every summer so that I could get away and learn about different cultures.  In school, I was always pretty smart and that gave me more opportunities than the rest. These two things are what I think made the difference for me.

I chose MTC because of my experiences being educated in a rural and pretty poor county. It was actually my Senior year before I realized how far behind we really were. Mississippi has this award called “STAR student”. This award is given to the student in each school that has the highest ACT score, provided it’s at least an 18. I won this award my Senior year and was allowed to go along with my “STAR teacher” to the state awards ceremony. When we arrived, and they began calling out the highest ACT scores and the classes that they were taking I was amazed. Had I not gone to space camp, I would’ve never known what Astronomy was and they were taking the class in high school. It really put in to perspective what college was going to be like for me. When I heard of MTC, I realized that this was an opportunity for me to give back to a community like my own and hopefully give these children a small piece of a better education-academically, socially, emotionally and mentally.

The biggest challenge of teaching for me has been dealing with administration. Enough said. Second biggest challenge: My students come to me with so many problems and I always want to fix everything for them, but I can’t. I spend a lot of time how thinking about what I can do to make things better for them.

I have realized that you never lose any of them because they all get something even if they don’t get everything. There have been so many times that I’ve thought that one was completely lost and then they came back with something that you taught them and you realize that on some level they were paying attention.

The Mississippi Teacher Corps is the most competitive alternate-route teaching program in the country. It is a two-year program that recruits recent college graduates to teach in critical-shortage areas in the Mississippi Delta, in exchange for a full scholarship for a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Mississippi. The program was founded in 1989 by Amy Gutman, a Harvard University graduate student, and Dr. Andy Mullins, then Special Assistant to the State Superintendent of Education. Since 1989 more than 350 participants, reaching an estimated 70,000 students, have taught in critical-needs school districts as part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps.