This past May, Shaquita Bandy graduated from nursing school at St. Andrews University’s. Of course, Bandy’s mother, Dorothy Miller was proud of her daughter’s accomplishment, but it was a moment of personal pride too. After all, she’d helped launch the nursing school at St. Andrews — and now her daughter was in the school’s first graduating class.
It wasn’t a scenario that many would have predicted when Miller gave birth to her daughter at the age of 15.
“We came from a lower socioeconomic background,” Miller told WRAL. “When I got pregnant, I was in ninth grade.”
To provide her daughter, Shaquita Bandy, with the best possible future, Miller joined the military. She later attended nursing school and earned a bachelor of science in nursing. She followed that with multiple masters degrees and eventually a PhD. In 2021, Miller — that’s Dr. Miller, actually — helped establish St. Andrews’ new school of nursing.
“She gave me everything I needed to make sure I’m successful,” Bandy told WRAL. “You can imagine the pressure, though, coming through a program that was just established by your mother, being the first one to graduate, trying to make sure that you keep the program going … it’s tremendous pressure, but they say pressure makes diamonds.”
“I had a wonderful mother when I was going through all that at 15,” Miller said. “Her goal for me was to not stop school. I had my child on a Friday, and my mother made sure I was in school that next Monday.”
“Nobody should be able to tell you what your future is,” Dr. Miller said. “What some people saw as a mistake, having a child so young, to me was a catalyst. I think that if I hadn’t been given the opportunity to have that child, I wouldn’t have accomplished what I did. By having her, it pushed me to do something outside of me so that I could have a better future for her.”