Ella McNeill waited anxiously Saturday deep inside the Georgia Dome, her academic medals and stole in place but slightly askew as if they, too, were caught up in the nervous energy.
People buzzed all around her, pulling at their gowns, fixing their caps. One floor above, the seats filled quickly for the Strayer University graduation ceremony, with families and friends clutching congratulatory bouquets and camera phones at the ready.
Every graduate must take a journey to earn her degree. McNeill's just happened to be 25 years in the making.
Now a proud grandmother, the Austell resident never had been one to worry what anyone thought of her. Originally from Linden, N.J., she graduated high school but motherhood came before she got into college. She took her first college class at age 24 but had to juggle coursework with adulthood: I'm the old one, she thought of herself among classmates.
When you have kids, you work your life around them. McNeill was no different. A single parent, her primary concern was to make sure she could provide for her three children and keep a roof over their heads.
She got a job as an administrative assistant. She moved to Atlanta to work for the former BellSouth -- 14 years later she is with AT&T Mobility's business development team.
Still, McNeill found a stigma attached to being an administrative assistant without a college degree. While job experience was nice, she found that the farther up the corporate ladder she moved, the more she was expected to have one.
"I know we make decisions when we're young that are not necessarily in our best interests, but you have to want to develop," said McNeill, 49, who crossed the stage as Strayer's valedictorian. She managed to maintain a 4.0 GPA while earning her bachelor's degree in business administration. "You've got to finish what you've started," she said.
It was a lesson she took to heart, not least because of daughters Tiffany and LaShelle, and her son, Lee, and 9-year-old grandson, Jermaine. More than two dozen family members and co-workers attended the ceremony. McNeill's parents drove in from North Carolina to see her fulfill a lifelong dream.
"I had doubts I could continue my journey," McNeill told classmates in her speech. Then, with her mortarboard square and firmly on her head, she did just that. She became the first in her family to earn a college degree.
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