Mother Of Ten Earns Dual Graduate Degrees

Jet, Jan 15, 2001 by Margena A. Christian

If you set a goal, you have to do everything possible to fulfill it, believes Colleen Samuels. And Samuels believes in practicing what she preaches. The mother of 10 children recently graduated from New York City's Yeshiva University, earning both a law degree and a master's degree in social work. She is the first person in the history of Yeshiva to simultaneously earn the two degrees.

The 40-year-old native Jamaican commuted six hours roundtrip via bus each day from her home in Stroudsburg, PA, for four years to attend the University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and its Wurzweiler School of Social Work.

Since developing a love of tort law in law school, she has joined, as an associate, the firm of Sciretta & Venterina, which does public authority defense work and medical malpractice, in New York. And more recently she's celebrating passing the New York State bar exam on her first attempt.

"This was my goal. I was only going to do it once," Samuels reveals to JET of taking the bar exam. "If you want to practice law, you've got to pass the bar. That's the bottom line. At 40 with 10 kids, I don't have time to waste. It's not like I'm 25 and have no responsibilities. I've got to get out there and make money to support my family and pay my loans. Certain things you don't have a choice with."

While many marvel at how the tenacious mother was able to successfully complete a joint law-social work degree program, practically everyone wonders how she was able to juggle studies with her busy family life.

She and her husband of 12 years, Steve, 43, also a native of Jamaica, head a blended family of 10 that consists of: Stacey-Ann, 24; Steve II, 19; Thaddeus, 18; Erin, 18; Dujon, 18; Sean, 17; Stefan, 16; Adam, 11; Rachel, 6; and Gabrielle Olivia, 18 months.

Samuels says that her husband, a patient technician for a health care firm, was a key factor in her completing her education. Also, her parents, father Aston Brown, 87, and mother Alphonsene Brown, 79, who live with Samuels and her husband, assisted in taking care of the younger children, thus easing the burden of childcare expenses.

"They are all a blessing," Samuels says of her family. "Without them I wouldn't have been able to do this."

She admits that striving for her goal wasn't an easy task. Samuels says it was quite difficult walking away from a well-paying job as a bus operator for the New York City Transit Authority with no debt only to cradle herself in debt with student loans for perhaps "the next 30 years."

In addition to financial woes, Samuels said she had to overcome the awkward initial feeling of perceiving herself as "a sore thumb" because she was considerably older than her classmates.

"I had to realize that it was not about age," she points out. "I had to get over it, and it got easier when I saw my grades."

But being about the business of completing her education under extraordinary circumstances hasn't been anything new for Samuels.

After transferring 14 credits from two previous colleges she had attended, Samuels, then 34, began full-time studies at the State University of New York at Stoney Brook in Sept. of 1994. Remarkably, in June of 1996, she completed what should have been four years of studies in less than two years. And she did it with honors!

"Once again, I didn't really have a whole lot of time to waste. I couldn't afford to be out of the workforce for the next three years. I carried 24 credits a semester. You don't have much choice here. If you have a goal in mind, you just have to do it," reveals Samuels, who graduated cum laude with a double major in social science and Africana Studies.

Once completing undergraduate studies, she went straight to law school. Then, a short while later, Samuels decided to work on a master's degree in social work.

She acknowledges that many had their reservations about a mother of 10 taking on a dual graduate program of this nature, especially when it had never been done before at Yeshiva.

Observes Samuels, "I knew somewhere along the line this had been attempted before and not completed. Others had attempted, but found it just too much. For me it was not an option. Once you start something, you finish it and the faculty and staff at both schools went out of their way to make it possible."

Samuels says she was moved to enter law and social work, while being a bus driver. After years of transporting teens and the elderly on her Brooklyn route, she realized a need to fulfill a higher calling.

"Over the course of years, you pick up the children and watch them grow. Then some of them would disappear. When I would ask one of them what happened to someone, they would say, `Oh, he's upstate or dead.' It bothered me. I started thinking of ways to do something about it. There are far too many African-American children in jail," she says.

What Samuels decided to do was resign from her job and take action. She decided to return to school and earn graduate degrees in law and social work so that she could assist families with legal problems and social work issues all at the same time.