By: De Anna Ward, Director of Marketing & Communications for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America
When did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up?
For me, it was elementary school, in Topeka, Kansas, when I declared, “I want to be a television reporter!”
Maybe it was because I liked to talk — a lot — and ask questions. No one in my family was familiar with that career choice: my father was a high school principal, mom was a teacher, my favorite aunt was a nurse…but television?
And when I told someone outside my family about my dreams, they said ‘…pick something else, little Black girls don’t grow up to be on television’.
That was long before Oprah.
What was meant to be a deterrent motivated my parents and me. I received a full academic scholarship to Jackson State in Mississippi, an historical black university
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