On May 11, 2018, Jacqueline Ruddy will be awarded her Master of Social Work (MSW). She said every minute of her journey to this point has been worth it: All the barriers, all the sacrifices, all the hardships have made her a better person. Now she is ready and equipped with a graduate degree to give back to her community and be a voice for the people who need her.

Ruddy’s path toward becoming a social worker started when she was a girl. “I was a latchkey kid,” she said. A child of divorce, she was raised by her mother, who worked in a factory. Her father was not in the picture.

When she was 15, a social worker visited Ruddy’s home, and she was finally able to reveal a secret she had been keeping: that she had been molested in her home by her mother’s boyfriend. The social worker sent her to a neighbor’s house while she spoke to Ruddy’s mother. “When I came back I expected my mom to put her arms around me and say it’s going to be okay,” she said. “But she didn’t. She just said, ‘I don’t believe this.’ And the social worker told me ‘You need to pack. We need to go.’”

Ruddy was devastated by her mother’s reaction. “I had finally told someone what had been going on, and now I was being taken from my home and moved into foster care.” But it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to her. She had been living with no parental guidance and had stopped going to school. But now with her foster mother, Ruddy felt she had someone who cared and who expected things of her. “Something crazy happened. I found that I was more than just some dumb kid that nobody loved and nobody cared about,” Ruddy said. “My whole life didn’t change, but there was a spark.”

Jacqueline Ruddy: Diversity Scholarships Jacqueline Ruddy is a former foster youth, a breast cancer survivor, and a single mom who has also fought through poverty and homelessness to become the first person in her Puerto Rican family to receive an undergraduate and now a graduate degree. She is finally living her dream - but she was only able to achieve all this through the help of scholarships. View the Video

 

Overcoming Barriers to Success

Ruddy did not remain in foster care; eventually she was placed back in her home with her mother. At 17, she was once again without guidance, and ended up becoming pregnant. By 18, she had given birth, dropped out of school and was living on welfare.

Then the second major “spark” in her life occurred. While pregnant, she received financial assistance for medical expenses. After having her baby, that amount was supposed to increase to help her care for the child. “My social worker did something that I’m forever grateful to her for doing,” Ruddy said. The social worker told her the approval of the additional funds was conditional upon Ruddy registering for college. “So, I ran down and registered,” she said. “I didn’t end up staying, and I failed, but I had my first taste of college.”

It would take Ruddy more than 25 years to return to school. She wanted to become what she had always dreamed of becoming: a therapist. When she finally took that leap, she was a single mom, again, with two more young children. She did not want to go back to working three jobs to support her family, as she had done in the past. She did not know how she would manage, financially, but she took the first step.

Seven years ago, at the age of 46, Ruddy stepped back onto a campus. She remembers her first day in class, looking around at all the students: “They were different ages, different colors. I realized for the first time I had a future, and I was part of something that was so much bigger than me.”

Unfortunately, Ruddy would have yet another obstacle to overcome. One month into her undergraduate classes, she found a lump which proved to be breast cancer. “I’m in school, I’m poor, I’m not getting child support. And I have cancer,” she explained. “People suggested I take a break from school, but I had already taken a twenty-year break!”

Ruddy began scheduling chemotherapy around her classes and forged ahead with her education. “Breast cancer taught me how strong I am,” she said. “I made it work. Because that’s what I learned I could do. And the more I did this, the stronger I became. The more resilient I became. And I began to draw on the bits of resiliency from childhood, the resiliency from the traumas I had encountered, and I began to have confidence in myself.”

Two days before her senior year classes began, Ruddy learned that her cancer had returned. This time it was Stage III recurrent breast cancer, and it had spread to her lymph nodes. Initially, Ruddy was angry. But then she realized she had learned how to advocate for herself, and now she needed to be able to show other people how to do what she had done. She had fought breast cancer before, while in school, while raising her children—and she would do it again. “I needed to show my boys what it means to stay focused and stay the course,” she said.

The Impact of Scholarships

In 2016, Ruddy became the first person in her family to receive a bachelor’s degree. She worked hard and was awarded multiple scholarships, which made the difference in her ability to survive as a full-time student and mother. The more she asked for help, the more she learned about resources that were available, such as scholarships for first-generation college students and former foster youth.

“I knew I had to start applying to graduate schools while I was still sick,” Ruddy said. “But the reality was, I was so weak from chemotherapy and radiation, I managed to get only one application in. Just one. To the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. It was where I really wanted to go, and I just prayed I would get in.”

Ruddy was accepted to USC, and now, through scholarships large and small, she is receiving her MSW. “It’s not easy to be a student and progress,” said Ruddy. “We can’t do it without help. I couldn’t do it without help.”

For Ruddy, scholarship support made the critical difference and allowed her to follow her educational dreams. Her personal experiences and her openness about them help her to understand and guide others.

"I’m doing everything I set out to do,” Ruddy said. “I am a speaker, I am a coach, I am a mentor. I’m still learning, but I’m also doing and showing. I have received tremendous support. I know I’m destined to pay what’s been given to me forward through my communications, through my speaking, through my services directly with clients. God has big plans for me and I’m listening and I’m doing it.”