In December, 2006, Glynis Pegram earned a hard-won associate degree from Tidewater Community College (Norfolk, VA), where she also heads up the Supplemental Instructors (SI) program. This fall, she will enroll at the University of Virginia to pursue a bachelor's in anthropology and women's studies. Today, she is a model example of a student success story, but her life wasn't always on that track.

In fact, Pegram's life has been a series of challenges that began with an injury at age 4 — one that put her in a coma for months. That injury may have been the cause of a long-undiagnosed disability that led her to drop out of school at 14. After that, she got pregnant, married and took years of abuse before divorcing and struggling with a range of jobs — from bowling alley attendant to dressmaker to working with a tax preparer — all without even a GED. She also survived childhood abuse and adult bouts with cancer. She met them all with a “will to survive and make a difference,” Pegram quietly says.

Finally her own children, now adults, persuaded her to get her GED and go to college. One of her sons candidly advised her she needed to “get a life” apart from her children. She enrolled at TCC to change her life and to devote herself to something new.

Pegram initially placed into developmental courses at TCC. At first, afraid and intimidated by her inability to comprehend the subject matter, she would actually vomit during math class. Her professor and others at TCC recommended counseling, where at last she was diagnosed as learning challenged. She cannot comprehend writing or numbers without primary senses — hearing, seeing and touching — engaged simultaneously.

TCC’s work with Achieving the Dream helped shape processes that assisted Pegram all along the way — instructors trained to spot developmental students in trouble, counselors primed to work with such students and tutors who helped her through the math classes that almost kept her from an education. Now she is a tutor herself, an SI for TCC in Math and English, who also oversees other SIs.

With her specialized study methods firmly engrained, Pegram will move on to UVA this August, focused on a goal of nurturing women’s success. “I’ll miss my family and my students here at TCC, but I hope they’ll see themselves taking a similar path someday.”