Why Not Me?

One of the author's earliest memories is of her first-grade teacher telling her about something she had learned in college, and the author wondered: Why not me. She asked her father if she could go, and he said, "I'm not a rich man. There's no way under the sun you can go to college." "Just watch me," she thought, and began finding ways to earn money, determined to prove him wrong. Before she even learned to read, a college education became her goal, because her parents constantly insisted...