For more than 60 years, Glamour has honored exceptional college women across the U.S. This year, we turned our focus to students enrolled in community college. Ola Louisa Watson started college at 72 years old and was overwhelmed by the technology skills required. She buckled down, and now she’s an honors student on her way to a four-year university. 

On her first day of college, Ola Louisa Watson brought a clipboard. How else would she take notes during class and make sure important paperwork, like parking instructions and directions, were visible at all times? “Everybody on campus—all the kids—thought I was an administrator because I was carrying that clipboard,” Watson tells me over Zoom. 

She laughs about it now but admits the clipboard was just one piece of an overwhelming technological obstacle course she had to navigate in order to assimilate and excel as a college student when she enrolled at Horry-Georgetown Technical College in Conway, South Carolina, in 2019, at 72 years old. She articulated this particular challenge best in her application to become one of Glamour’s College Women of the Year, explaining that she’d taken a refresher course on Word and Excel before school started so she thought she’d be good to go.

 “WRONG!” she wrote. “I was faced with having to operate the college’s WaveNet software program and had to learn to submit information via Dropbox. Within those first days and weeks, I had to learn McGraw Hill’s Connect and other software with assignments and tests which had to be completed and submitted via the internet. I had to learn to use a TI-84 calculator, I had to create PowerPoint presentations, access and use e-books, I had to make and submit videos for assignments, learn about WiFi.” And this was before COVID-19 hit and a whole new set of technological challenges materialized. 

A lot of people her age—most, maybe?—would have thrown in the towel and retreated into the very full and comfortable life they’d built. Why bother with the mind-melting tedium of mastering a TI-84 when you can enjoy your two grown daughters and two grandsons, the fruits of a 40-year career spent working with in-need mothers and children, your wonderful husband with whom you’ve just celebrated your 55th wedding anniversary, your home on beachside Pawleys Island (“as the crow flies, two miles from the Atlantic Ocean!”). 

 Watson is not one of those people. Although higher education didn’t become official until her seventh decade, school and learning has always figured prominently in her life.  

One Watson’s clearest memories from her childhood in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was routinely having to stop what she was doing and hide underneath her desk in elementary school in case today was the day the atom bomb dropped. 

“It was called duck and cover,” she says, laughing at the quaint idea that crouching down and covering one’s head could protect from a nuclear attack. But this was the early 1950s, a time when Cold War anxiety was at an all-time high, especially in Fayetteville, whose proximity to the largest military base in the world, Fort Bragg, was significant. Also significant: the overwhelming number of military-adjacent children living in the city during those years. So many that Watson and her classmates had to go to school on split schedules. “Some of us went in the morning, then after Christmas to June you went in the afternoons,” she says. When she moved to Charlotte in fourth grade with her family, not only did the duck-and-cover drills start to wane but she was able to resume life as a regular full-time elementary school student. 

A good student, she says, all the way through high school. For many female baby boomers, attending a four-year college wasn’t unheard of, but it wasn’t at the top of Watson’s to-do list, either. “When I graduated high school, I’d thought a little bit about it but just couldn’t get it together,” Watson says. “What I wanted to do was get married. I fell in love when I was 12 years old and never wavered from that boy.”

It was her parents who pushed her to pursue some sort of continuing education. “I’ll never forget my mother saying, ‘Dave’—talking about my boyfriend—‘is from a wonderful family. And it probably won’t ever be a problem, but you need to know how to support yourself.’” 

And so off she went to an all-girls secretarial school, visions of Della Street looming (“You probably won’t know who that is,” she tells me, “unless you watched Perry Mason.”) After a year Watson became an executive secretary, but Della Street she was not. So she got married in 1966 and, while she enjoyed her first few jobs, two baby girls came quickly. 

For more than 60 years, Glamour has honored exceptional college women across the U.S. This year, we turned our focus to students enrolled in community college. Meet Tay Mosely, a student, tutor, and blogger who has helped a number of fellow students better themselves. 

At 46, Mosely is a self-reliant survivor who’s managed to clear hurdle after hurdle with an enviable level of determination. Now the Sinclair Community College student is set to graduate this year with her degree in hospitality and event planning. 

Through her blog, Tay’s Bipolar Kitchen, Mosely shares her favorite recipes and cooking tips as a way to heal. “What I want people to understand most about my blog is that there are lots of things in life that can help you get through. For me, it was my cooking, and the lesson that I learned is, when my mental health was bad, my cooking declined,” she says.

Mosely’s challenges with her mental health began when she was growing up in Southern California. Her mother was killed five days before she turned one year old, leaving her in the care of her maternal grandmother. To say she had a tough childhood is an understatement. “I was a highly people-pleasing type of child,” she says. “Pleasing people was just one of the things I always tried to do to try to keep myself safe and make sure everybody was happy and liked me.” 

As a kid, Mosely knew she was unlike her peers. When she became an adult, those feelings swelled. She battled with depression, and during her lowest moment, she says, she attempted to take her own life. “After I was in the hospital, they diagnosed me with major depressive disorder,” she says. After spending time in an intensive outpatient program several days a week, she realized something was still off. “I was functional, but I wasn’t getting better,” she says. “I finally saw another psychiatrist, who says, ‘You know, I don’t think you’re major depressive. I think you are bipolar II.’” 

It was like a light switched on, and her days became more manageable. Receiving the correct diagnosis changed Mosely’s life, and through therapy, cooking, and other forms of treatment, the people pleaser also learned the importance of putting herself first and setting boundaries. “You have to pour into yourself before you’re able to produce anything that could be good for anyone else,” she says. “Then once you’re able to do that—once you’re able to build up your self-esteem and self-love and those types of things—setting boundaries becomes easier because you realize it’s worth it. Your peace is the most valuable thing you have.”

Throughout the odd jobs and her mental health challenges, one major source of joy was cooking. In the fall of 2001, Mosely’s grandmother was battling esophageal cancer; she had just finished chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and the idea of cooking Thanksgiving dinner for a family of 20 was too much. Mosely volunteered, and it was, as she wrote in an essay describing the challenge, a disaster.

The budding chef, who says she’d watched one too many episodes of Emeril on TV, bit off more than she could chew. At 5 a.m she entered the kitchen as confident as her beloved Emeril Lagasse; by noon the mood was more reminiscent of Hell’s Kitchen. She underestimated the amount of prep time needed to cook 18 items from scratch. Despite the culinary struggles, she managed to get dinner served on time and rejoiced at how happy her family was to eat her food. This started a genuine love of food and service. 

Never underestimate the time and effort it takes to discover who you are and what you’re made of. To paraphrase the late great Miles Davis, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself. In Mosley’s case, getting to where she is now—confident and clear about what she wants—took the better part of her 20s, 30s, and well into her 40s, but now she has settled into a lifestyle that suits her. 

“It doesn’t matter if you’re 20 or 50 or whatever…follow that dream. Maybe you haven’t done what you wanted to do up to this point. At least you can go out on a bang and say, ‘I did what I wanted to do. I said what I wanted to say. I saw who I wanted to see.’ You know?”

For more than 60 years, Glamour has honored exceptional college women across the U.S. This year, we turned our focus to students enrolled in community college. Meet Lavada Burse, who overcame severe depression partly thanks to a strong, inclusive campus community and her leadership role within the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society.

When Lavada Burse approached the podium this past May to deliver the commencement speech for all of Grayson College’s graduating classes of 2021, she was a clear embodiment of Grayson’s mission and vision: “A premier learning college that transforms individuals, builds communities, and inspires excellence by having students connect, commit, and complete.”

At 42, she never imagined she’d be up there delivering an address to her fellow students, as this isn’t her first go at community college. Burse took her first dip 20 years ago, in 2001. But at the time, moving to Texas from Stuttgart, Arkansas, without any family or financial support created an uphill battle. Burse was paying out-of-state tuition and coping with food insecurity while trying to prove she met the legal requirements to be an independent student and receive federal financial aid. “I didn’t have the money to pay per month. And so I used my bill money,” she says. “One month it would be the electricity, and then the next month it would be my car note. I was juggling beyond my means.”

Although a love of education always stayed top of mind, Burse decided that focusing on her career in retail would be a more viable option. “It caused so much chaos just trying to go to school. I knew it had to be easier than this.” And with her dream of becoming a certified public accountant on pause, Burse made do by working while still taking online classes here and there. But, as is often the case with driven people who genuinely have a love for academia, that wasn’t enough to fulfill her.

Following the birth of her youngest son, Roland, now six years old, Burse moved her family to Denison, where she later enrolled at Grayson College in 2017 to give herself a second chance. “I figured it would be so much easier​—I’ve been a Texas resident for 18 years now. I have children. It should be a walk in the park.”

But apprehension set in as Burse navigated through her early days at Grayson. Having been out of the academic game for many years, she was hit with imposter syndrome and questioned her worthiness and ability to succeed in college. It was then, she says, depression set in. To be clear, Burse says she’s always suffered from anxiety and depression but didn’t always have the tools to work on herself. 

But despite having a tough time getting out of bed, she did manage to get an invitation, via email, to join Phi Theta Kappa, the international honor society for two-year colleges. Burse, with the support of her advisor, set aside any reservations and took the plunge.

“I made every excuse in the book to avoid even making it to the initial induction ceremony,” says Burse. “But I knew I had to get out of the funk, even if it meant finding the longest dress possible since I didn’t shave or paint my toenails.”

Ultimately, Phi Theta Kappa was Burse’s bright light. By staying involved and staying active, she found a reason to get out of bed and started to display a level of leadership and excellence that couldn’t be ignored.

“My community kept asking me, ‘What do you want to be?’ And my heart was telling me, ‘president of Phi Theta Kappa,’” says Burse. “But I had to battle the ‘You’re not good enough, just run for vice president’ thoughts.” And before she knew it, with the unwavering support she received from her counselor and advisor, Burse began the #Lavada2020 campaign that eventually earned her the titles of Texas regional president for Phi Theta Kappa and Phi Theta Kappa’s 2020–2021 international president, the highest leadership position available to students in the organization.

Additionally, Burse—a self-described introvert—served on the board of trustees at Grayson College as the student liaison to share her perspective as an over-40 student, a single mom working full time, a woman overcoming depression and anxiety, a student studying to become an accountant. She credits the community at Grayson for encouraging her to succeed and stay engaged.

“Just being around a like-minded and diverse group of people has helped me to grow as a mother, a student, a coworker, and as a leader. And I don’t want to stop,” says Burse. “For me, I’m like, What can I get into next? I’m looking into my future choice in college. I want to attend the University of North Texas. And so, I’m looking into what can I do now, what can I do more of?”

Ru Wolle is an associate editor at Glamour.

For more than 60 years, Glamour has honored exceptional college women across the U.S. This year, we turned our focus to students enrolled in community college. Meet Tiffany-Autumn D. Bell, a disabled army vet who is studying entrepreneurship and who already has started two small businesses.  

In 2020 the pandemic turned the world of small businesses upside down as entrepreneurs scaled back or shut down. This wasn’t true for Stephon Sanders, the 14-year-old owner of a mobile gaming business. The enterprising teen’s story even made it to the local news.

He didn’t do it all alone. Stephon’s mother, Tiffany-Autumn D. Bell—a powerhouse student and disabled veteran—is also a budding business mastermind. Long before Bell became a mother, she had big entrepreneurial dreams. “I wanted to attend college and be a business lawyer,” says Bell, a self-proclaimed army brat.

As a high school student on the brink of graduation, the last thing she wanted to do was follow in the footsteps of her mother, father, and stepdad, all of whom were in the military. Then at 18 she got pregnant and gave birth to Stephon.

“At first I said, ‘I have a plan: I’m going to college, I’m going to raise my son and do everything.’ Then I realized…kids are expensive,” she says with a laugh.

Bell was headstrong and independent. She wanted to create a stable home for her son, and at that point in her life, she felt joining the service was her only option.

“I shocked everyone when I told them I was joining the military,” she says. Though her parents wanted her to choose a different path, they were willing to help. But they were also on active duty: her mother was deployed to Iraq, her father worked in D.C., and her stepdad was in Virginia.

Although Bell had a support system while she was pregnant, college wasn’t an option for the financial independence she wanted. “The military gave me an out in order to be able to still take care of my son and do everything I needed to do and not depend on my parents,” she says.

For the span of her decade-long military career, she carried a picture of her son. This was especially true when she spent 29 straight months in Afghanistan, an experience she prefers to not elaborate on. “My son is what kept me going through duty station after duty station,” Bell says.

She was also determined to prove haters—and anyone who felt she wasn’t strong enough—wrong. “There was always someone like, ‘Okay, she’s going to give up now. Or this is going to be too hard or she’s going to come back home,’ and I didn’t want that,” she says.

The experience took its toll. As Bell explains, the wear and tear of the military, both physical and mental, wore her down. “I am 100% disabled,” says the 34-year-old, also choosing not to elaborate. Inserting herself back into civilian life starting in 2013 was also a challenge. She had to pick up where her former teenage self had left off. “I had to learn how to be an adult. Until that point, somebody always told me what to do, how to be, what to wear, even how I should feel,” she says.

Not to mention a lot had happened in that decade, the majority of which she didn’t have time to process. She had gotten married and divorced. She was also pregnant, then she lost her child. “When you get out, you don’t realize how abnormal it was and how you didn’t deal with a lot of things.”

Despite those hard days, Bell built an ironclad sisterhood with other women in the military and has no regrets. She’s proud of herself for making a living and being able to support her family.

Now, a few years later and on the heels of graduating from Hillsborough Community College in Brandon, Florida, she’s set to earn a degree in business development and entrepreneurship. And she’s already gotten a head start on running a business, thanks to her son.

After Bell returned home from Afghanistan, she asked her then 13-year-old son what he wanted for his birthday. His response? To have his own business. Specifically, he wanted to create and own a game truck. Bell thought he’d forget like any normal teenager. “I thought that if I gave him a couple of weeks, the idea would die off, but he was committed,” she says. Eventually, Stephon picked up yard work in the neighborhood, sold candy, and launched a GoFundMe to raise money for his startup.

With the newfound clarity of eventual sobriety, Haley turned her attention to education, something she says was always important to her in an abstract way growing up in Nashua, New Hampshire. She suffered from dysgraphia, a learning disability, in elementary school and as she got older was written off by some teachers who thought she was a “waste case” who just wasn’t showing up to school, when in actuality she was playing caretaker to her younger sister and couldn’t always leave her mother during active addiction. Still, she was in AP classes her freshman and sophomore years (“Kind of surprised everybody, I think”), and when her own addiction progressed during her last two years of high school, she dropped out—but joined night school in order to graduate. 

College wasn’t on the immediate table, but it was always there on the horizon, a distant option for a future version of herself.

“I always said if I could just get clean, I would go to college. But I said it like how people say they want to go to the moon. It’s for better people. It’s never going to happen for me, but man, wouldn’t it be nice? And so, I got clean and then I was like, ‘Well, now we’re here.’”

A willingness to learn was always there, and Haley says both her parents were deeply intelligent people despite not having formal education. “My father dropped out of school in middle school, but he loved Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. He was teaching me about string theory when I was 14.” Even during her darkest days, Haley says, she always carried with her a bag filled with books she collected along the way, and she relied on them as an escape. But as her brain became clearer, it wanted more.

She applied to Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts, and got in, but she was concerned about not getting financial aid because of stories she’d heard about not being granted assistance if you have a criminal record, even misdemeanors. Luckily, though, aid came through, on a day she remembers clearly. “I cried and I said, ‘This is so amazing.’ I just so badly wanted to share it with my parents.” She went to a meeting in Taunton that day and says that by the end, 30 or 40 people lined up to hug her and tell her they were proud. “It wasn’t a replacement, but my God, it was such a gift.”

At Bristol, Haley excelled. A substance abuse counseling program was the goal, which would take less than a year and required only three classes a semester. The problem: to receive full financial aid in Massachusetts, she needed to be a full-time student. “How about you just switch to a psychology major?” her advisor asked. “You still get the certification, and then you can just stop when you get it.”

But after she got a taste of formal education, stopping was not an option. “Just being in a classroom, listening, writing papers. I fell in love with academia,” she says. “To have a guided education, to feel like I actually had a purpose. I was like, ‘I can’t stop.’”

Haley maintained a steady 4.0 grade-point average and set her sights on the University of Massachusetts. It was her advisor who, last year, floated the idea of also applying to some top-tier schools as well, even at 27 years old. Between her nagging imposter syndrome and the issue of her criminal record, she dismissed the idea immediately. “You never know,” her advisor said. 

“Going to UMass would have been a dream. Beyond what I thought was ever possible for me. But I said, ‘You know, we’re in a pandemic.’ I wasn’t working, I had all this extra time. ‘I’m just going to throw this net into the water and see what happens.’” Haley said she applied to 16 schools, including several traditional Ivy League colleges and universities. 

For the first time in its 60-year history, Glamour’s 2021 College Women of the Year are exclusively students enrolled at community colleges across America. What better way to commemorate this special series than to have Dr. Jill Biden, the first lady of the United States, talk to the undeniably powerful accessibility of community institutions, considering she is a professor at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), where her students know her as Dr. B.

“[NOVA] felt like home,” Dr. Biden tells Glamour Editor-in-Chief Samantha Barry during  an exclusive interview held at the White House in June. “I felt it was my niche.”

Dr. Biden teaches writing and says she demands a lot of her students—and herself. When she was serving as Second Lady, her writing was put to the test while applying for her professor position. As the only first lady thought to hold a paying job while in office, she sees herself reflected in her students, studying while taking care of their families and furthering their careers.

“One thing is clear: Dr. Jill Biden is the best national advocate for the power of community college that America has ever seen,” Barry says.

“People should know that community college is a stepping stone to whatever they want to do in the future,” Dr. Biden says. “They provide such a good, strong foundations. They’re very nurturing.”

Barry and Dr. Biden discussed the value of community college and the resilience of its students, running with secret service, and more in the interview, above. 

As we were sifting though the pile of applicants for Glamour’s 2021 College Women of the Year—focused entirely on community college students across the U.S.—we had an idea: Wouldn’t it be something if the first lady of the United States could somehow be involved? Like the applicants, she’s always struck a balance between work and commitments that come with family and community. And of course, Jill Biden, Ed.D., is probably the most visible advocate we have for community colleges and how they can contribute to educational equity—she taught at Delaware Technical & Community College, and since 2009 she’s been a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA).

After some emails and successful Zoom calls with her team, Dr. Biden said she’d love to help, and so in early June, Glamour editor in chief Samantha Barry went to Washington, D.C., to interview her about the unequivocal value of community college institutions (watch that here). But we also managed to pull off a surprise for two of our applicants, who thought they were hopping on a Zoom for an interview with Glamour and instead were met with the first lady, who delivered the news that they were chosen as two of our 2021 Community College Women of the year. 

The two women are incredibly accomplished. You can read their stories—along with our other five honorees here—but here’s a snapshot: Tay Mosely, 46, attends Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, and is a beloved tutor in the college’s writing lab. She’s overcome some pretty heavy mental health challenges with grace and has found that blogging is a cathartic outlet.  On Tay’s Bipolar Cooking, she fuses her life’s twin pillars: cooking and mental health awareness—both of which go hand in hand for Tay. After graduation she plans to open her own catering business. 

Katherine Haley, 29, graduated from Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts, in  2021 as valedictorian of her class and is headed to Brown University in the fall. Katherine’s story is powerful and, honestly, incredible: Having overcome obstacles that include losing both her parents, homelessness, and a decade of drug addiction, she’s not only an advocate for recovery awareness but an exceptionally brave young woman charting a course that a previous version of herself could never have imaged. At Brown in the fall, she will study psychology to complete a bachelor’s degree. 

Suffice it to say, surprised is an understatement when both women signed on and saw FLOTUS waiting for them on Zoom. The conversations were heartfelt and honest, and prove that no matter how old you are or what situations you’ve found yourself in previously, community college is for everyone and can lead to some really incredible opportunities, as it has for Tay, Katherine, and all of our 2021 honorees.

For more than 60 years, Glamour has honored exceptional college women across the U.S. This year, we turned our focus to students enrolled in community college. Meet Avery Lalor, an aspiring airplane pilot and singer. 

Avery Lalor can taxi an airplane, take off, run radio communications, and navigate the skies using an aircraft’s GPS system. She has studied aerodynamics, engines, and meteorology.

She knows how to fly a plane using only cockpit instruments, without using any other visual, including looking out the window. Cumulatively, she has spent dozens and dozens of hours flying.

But for most of her life, she never dreamed of being a pilot.

“Honestly, I had never seen a female pilot,” she says. “I didn’t consider it. It wasn’t even in the back of my mind.” Lalor loves to travel—her family has been to 35 states, and she has a life goal of making it to all seven continents. But how could she have imagined making her career in the skies? Just over 5% of the world’s commercial airline pilots are women. And the U.S. lags behind—to put it in perspective, there are a higher percentage of female NASA astronauts than women pilots of US airlines.

Lalor finally realized—with prodding from her mom—that becoming a pilot is her perfect career. She took the controls of a plane for the first time, with supervision, at 16. In many cases, male pilot instructors have moved over in the cockpit to make room for Lalor, cheered her on, been her teachers. But regularly, she has encountered a potent form of the same discrimination that keeps all STEM fields male-dominated. She’s faced claims that women just can’t handle major machinery, can’t navigate, can’t be trusted to lead. She’s worked twice as hard, flown more, become textbook perfect, in the hope that male flight instructors will give her the same chance they give any man. The implication, again and again, is that women aren’t made for action—that we should just watch and applaud from afar.

“This just makes me more fired up,” Lalor says of the sexism. “I’m going to use this as my fuel.”

Lalor is a twin. Her sister, Emma, nominated her for Glamour College Woman of the Year, citing her commitment to not just succeeding in a male-dominated field, but bringing other women in aviation along with her. When Avery and Emma were graduating from high school, they realized that sending two kids to college at the same time would be a huge financial strain on the family And for Avery, there was another concern—flight school is expensive, what with paying for so many specialized instructors, fuel, and airtime. Both sisters started looking into community colleges.

“I talked to some counselors and picked their brains, and they said as long as [the credits are] transferable over to the next college, they’re the same classes; it’s just a less expensive option,” she says. Many teachers were supportive. But another, Lalor says, derisively compared going to a community college over a four-year university to going to the 99-cent store instead of Target.

“He doesn’t know our situation,” her parents told her. But Lalor held onto the stigma against community college. “I went into it thinking it was kind of shameful,” she says. “In my head I was like, Oh, community college is a step down from ‘real’ college. But it’s not! It’s just that it’s more affordable, and you can’t live on campus.” Lalor did some research and found Orange Coast—a local community college with an impressive aviation program. “It wasn’t my second choice,” she says, proudly. Community college wasn’t a compromise—it was perfect for her.

For pilots, it’s a long runway that leads from a teenage dream to takeoff. Lalor, who started learning how to fly by watching YouTube videos, just got her associates degree in aviation sciences. Next she’ll get her private pilot’s license, and then a bachelor’s degree. (A bachelor’s degree isn’t a requirement for commercial pilots, but Lalor wants one.) Then she’ll need a series of ratings, tests, and 250 hours of flight time to achieve a commercial pilot’s license. She’ll likely start at a regional airline. She can imagine getting a job as a Medevac pilot—something where she can help people but won’t have to see too much blood and guts. Then she’ll try for a job in, as she calls it, the big time, somewhere like Delta, Southwest, or American airlines.

“I think I always had it in my head—women can do anything—but I just didn’t consider aviation,” she says. “When I first started to get into it, I was like, ‘Why aren’t there more women doing this? This is so cool.’” Lalor has grown as a pilot when a male pilot has demonstrated confidence in her, who gave her a chance. As is their obligation, she points out. “Men need to step in and be a part of the solution,” she says, naming concrete ways men can make aviation more equitable, such as hiring women to elite positions, like CEO and manager of airline companies. “Men need to be supportive and allow women to take the forefront.”

In one sense, Lalor is in the same place she’s always been—she lives with her family, in the same county where she grew up. She and her twin sister have shared a bedroom for 20 years. And in another sense, she’s soaring. She works 24 hours a week at a coffee shop, and she sings—she recently released her first single, You’re My Type and has an Instagram account dedicated to covers. She aspires to be a working pilot, and a singer on the side. For most people, that would just be a fantasy. But Lalor is a systematic worker, and every semester she gets closer to her dreams.

The gender discrimination she has faced has been frustrating, she says. “But it also just makes me want to succeed even more,” she adds. “I’ll eventually be flying in those big airliner jets and say, ‘Hey, I still got through that. I’ve got this.’” 

Jenny Singer is Glamour’s staff writer

For more than 60 years, Glamour has honored exceptional college women across the U.S. This year, we turned our focus to students enrolled in community college. Meet Sabrina Valadez-Rios, an aspiring nurse, a public health advocate, and possibly the future mayor of Oakland, California. 

If you aren’t convinced that Sabrina Valadez-Rios might be an angel on earth, consider this: She drives around West Oakland, California, with hygiene packs for unhoused people and zip-lock bags filled with dog food in case she spots any strays. Plus, there’s just something in her voice that puts you at ease, and her heart is full of empathy for those dealing with loss, a concept she’s intimately familiar with.

When she was just 11 and growing up in the “rougher parts” of West Oakland, her father, Francisco Javier, was shot and killed in front of her childhood home. After his death, she was dealing with another kind of loss, as she says her mother struggled with mental health and wasn’t able to care for her children the same way she had before.

Javier had been enrolled at Berkeley City College and accepted to U.C. Berkeley, but when Valadez-Rios’s mother became pregnant with Sabrina, he paused his college education to care for his family. Now Valadez-Rios is continuing his legacy, as the first in his family to attend college, even enrolling in his former school, Berkeley City College, and a sister school, Alameda College in Alameda.

“He was the perfect balance of street smart and book smart, which I feel like I get from him,” Valadez-Rios says.

She’s taking one to two classes a semester so she can apply to nursing school and become a registered nurse. The degree and the license would enable her to do more for her community, but she still has to deal with some insecurity at work while she’s learning.

“I’m surrounded by so many intelligent people with all these degrees,” Valadez-Rios says. “Sometimes I feel less than. I’ll find myself not knowing what a word is or jotting down a word because later I search it up. So I do find little moments like that, but then I always look at myself and I’m like, ‘No, you’re here for a reason. You’re doing all these amazing things and you’re in school, you’re going to get there.’”

In addition to being a student, Valadez-Rios works as a program specialist at Lifelong Medical Care, a health center that caters to Medicaid patients. She wanted to do more with her newfound knowledge of the medical nonprofit field as she watched her community struggle and houselessness increase. When circumstances at home led to time spent in a women’s shelter, the lack of resources and the people she met there stuck with her.

“Just coming back into the real world after being there for a couple of days, I just looked at people and their sadness,” Valadez-Rios says. “It’s that look in their eyes. I was like, ‘How can I help you?’ We’re put on this world to help each other.”

She started volunteering in her spare time at the grassroots organization Freedom Community Clinic, which mixes an Indigenous, ancestral healing approach with Western medicine. This holistic health care is brought directly to the community, and Valadez-Rios leads outreach with the unhoused community. She and her team give out first-aid kits, patch up wounds, and even bandage barefoot pregnant women—but they provide something you may not typically see at an unhoused encampment: massage therapy. They bring blankets and massage tables to unhoused people, allowing them to keep an eye on their belongings and feel safe for a few minutes while they’re being treated.

“When you’re living out in the street, you’re always on your toes,” Valadez-Rios says. “You can never fully relax or take a deep breath because touch is not a good thing when you’re out in the street. You think of touch as violent. People get mugged and robbed. So, to be in this position to bring out people to do a quick massage and think of touch as a good thing, it’s so fulfilling.”

Her team administers reiki healing, which she calls “an energetic massage.” The process goes like this: A patient would tell the reiki practitioner what’s going on in their life, and the practitioner will align their stressors and root cause with their chakras, moving energy out of or into their body as needed. It also involves guided breathing, and Valadez-Rios says it feels like floating. It’s been very healing for her own grieving process, more so than talking to a therapist or seeking counseling.

“Even on my own journey, I always looked at massages as a luxury and only would do it on a spa day or something like that,” Valadez-Rios says. “I’ve actually found it to be very releasing to go into my whole grieving and heal my inner child.”