Jocelyn Daniels

Beacon Hill native and Seattle Central pre-Nursing student Jocelyn Daniels is hard at work finishing her second year of college as she prepares to pursue a career in healthcare with support from the Seattle Promise program. While she was accepted to the University of Washington, Daniels was leery of shouldering significant debt, and had her own concerns about college. Rather than take what she saw as a considerable financial risk, she opted to use the Promise scholarship to safely explore higher education.

While she’s the picture of calm confidence, Daniels is forthright about the source of her concerns; throughout much of her life, Daniels says, she has had to overcome a hurdle most students never experience: since she was a child she has had to work twice as hard as many of her peers due to a reading disability affecting her reading comprehension.

“I struggle with reading comprehension when text is laid out in paragraphs,” she tells us, “Ever since I was a kid I was pulled out of my regular classes to work on my reading, which meant I was missing normal class instruction time. It’s been a lot of trouble for me in my education, since we usually learn by reading! Over time I found I learn much better from video and audio than reading. I need to hear the voice, see images to understand.”

While it’s sometimes been challenging, the extra work required has never stopped Daniels from achieving her goals, or from pursuing her education. After graduating from high school, she was accepted to the University of Washington’s Education program, where she hoped to pursue a career as an elementary school teacher. Yet with admissions deadlines approaching, the more she considered this path, the more unsure she became that it was the right choice for her.

As the third of four children to an accountant mother and a mechanical engineer father, she was also cognizant that she would need to take on much of the financial responsibility for her education herself. Combined with her own fears about her ability to keep up with the workload in college, Daniels began to worry that she would be taking on too great a financial burden for an outcome she was no longer sure she wanted. A solution, however, was soon found.

Rather than take out loans to pay tuition at the UW while she looked for the area of study that resonated with her, she decided to attend Seattle Colleges for two years through the Seattle Promise while she decided what to do. Her mother suggested she consider a career in nursing, where she could help others as she wanted to. At first unsure if she would like it, Daniels enrolled at Seattle Central and began taking prerequisite courses for a Nursing program.

Now in her second year in Central’s Nursing program, this bright, ambitious young woman is wrapping up her prerequisite courses while working as a Certified Nursing Assistant, with plans to transfer to the UW next year – only this time, at the Bothell campus’s Nursing program. When she’s not in class or working, she makes time to go swimming and play the piano, a hobby she’s pursued since she was five.

When asked if she feels that she made the right choice pursuing Nursing at Central, her answer is an emphatic yes. “I actually enjoy the work a lot! There’s a lot of studying, which I like less,” she tells us with a laugh, “but I really enjoy working as a nursing assistant. I really like helping people, and I like getting to have a nice relationship with everyone I work with. I like having an impact on people.”