“I never had a place where I could show up and get my GED, and the Learning Center was that place for me.”
Taylor McQuiddy made the difficult decision to drop out of high school when she was 17 years old. At the time, she was severely bullied by her peers and received little support from her school. After feeling discouraged for so long, Taylor felt that dropping out was her best option. “If I stayed where I thought I was going to be when I was a teen, I would probably be dead,” she reflects.
Driven by this need for independence, she packed her bags and moved to Hawaii where she kept herself afloat by working in the service industry.
However, when the pandemic hit in 2020, the service industry was one of the most negatively impacted. As working conditions became increasingly less safe, Taylor decided that instead of putting her health at risk, she would take a break from work to focus on getting her GED. She bought GED study materials and tried studying herself, but made little progress on her own. “I would just give up because it was hard and there wasn’t enough accountability.”
Everything changed when she found the Literacy Coalition’s Learning Center. “I never had a place where I could show up and get my GED, and the Learning Center was that place for me.” Taylor appreciated the support she received from her instructors, “Don had a lot of confidence in me—a lot of overconfidence I always thought at the time,” she recalls. Yet she persisted. “The Learning Center gave me the confidence to keep going back and try to take the [GED] tests.”
In the spring of 2020, Taylor earned her GED and became the Literacy Coalition’s first GED graduate during the COVID-19 pandemic. “One of my happiest moments was telling the teachers that I passed and seeing the look on their face because they know that they helped somebody,” she reminisced.
Equipped with confidence and a newfound love for education, Taylor enrolled at Austin Community College in 2021. To help pay for her education, she sought out scholarships. “I found myself applying for scholarships to help with tuition and was awarded the Pierls Foundation Scholarship.”
Once enrolled, Taylor excelled in all her courses, earning all A’s in her first semester. Thanks to this dedication and impressive GPA, she was invited to join the college’s honor society, where she discovered a passion for research, learning new things, storytelling, and exploring ideas. She was also accepted in the UT Youth & Community Studies Fellow Program, a selective internship program that works within the UT Austin community.
Looking forward, Taylor has her sights set on earning her Bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin. She also foresees herself pursuing both a Master’s and PhD. “Definitely a master program is in my future no matter what,” she adds, “After that I will probably take a few years in the career field and then start looking into PhD research environments.” Mental health has always been a key component of her journey and she hopes to help integrate better mental health practices into the school system throughout her career.
Looking back, Taylor credits much of her academic success to the Literacy Coalition. Today, she encourages anyone considering the Literacy Coalition’s Learning Center to take the leap of faith and enroll, no matter their circumstance. “It doesn’t matter how old you are. If this is something you desire, keep that desire alive and it will take you places.”