When Nisha Jackson came to Wichita State, she said she was coming up from the hood to the hill.

“And it was just so beautiful,” said Jackson, a WSU alumna. “The first day I set foot on campus, all I could do was look around. The tulips were blooming, and I felt like I was in a park. I couldn’t believe all this was right next to the neighborhood where I lived, and nobody ever came up to see it.”

Diversity and inclusion are mandates for any public institution, but for Jackson, WSU went out of its way to meet her needs — and helped her become the success she is today.

Jackson moved from Dallas to Wichita in 2006 — a young, single mom of three who wanted a safer place to live. She worked as a certified nurse’s aide, though she didn’t earn enough to make a living.

“I really got tired of being on Section 8 and public housing and food stamps,” she said. “The way they treat you when you go in for services is just deplorable, so I expected the same thing here.”

But she said that wasn’t the case.

“When I came to Wichita State and went in for services, they were like, ‘We are here to help you. You are here helping yourself, so we’re going to help you.’ It was amazing.”

With encouragement, Jackson began looking after her health with the same zeal she took to her studies. She went to the Heskett Center to exercise. She reached outside the university to get help for her entire family, working with doctors and nutritionists in Via Christi’s “Shapedown” program where they adopted a new, healthy lifestyle. Jackson and her daughters were so successful they were featured in an issue of Via Christi’s “Life” magazine two years ago.

In 2011, Jackson graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in general studies, and in 2013, finished a master’s in aging studies.

Barriers

As an undergraduate, Jackson weighed 360 pounds. She was a non-traditional student — with children — and came from a struggling socioeconomic status.

“It’s just fear,” she said. “‘Am I going to be successful when I get up there? Will there be people like me? Are they going to help me?’ When I started, I just really wanted to eliminate barriers to success. Anything I could control, I did.”

For Jackson, some of those early barriers seemed overwhelming. It was hard to get financial aid and admissions paperwork together. She didn’t have a car to track down all the documents she needed. She didn’t have money to send off for her high school transcript.

“It’s hard if you’re not comfortable being on campus,” she said. “You’re not comfortable walking into an office and asking for help with an application.

That makes people think maybe you’re not ready for college — but maybe you really are. Maybe you’re ready to handle just one class. That’s how I started. That’s how I learned it was doable.”

Then there was the issue of her weight.

“I was super, morbidly obese, and I couldn’t even sit in the desks at Wichita State,” Jackson told an audience at a Student Support Services banquet in 2010.

Getting Help

As an undergraduate, Jackson got help from Disability Services, which provided a cart every day to get her to her class. The organization made sure she had desks she could sit in. In all, according to Disability Services director Grady Landrum, Jackson probably didn’t require that much assistance, but he does remember her positive outlook.

“She has been very independent and used our services very little over the years,” Landrum said. “I just remember her as being a pleasant person to talk with and wanting to improve her situation.”

Jackson first learned about Student Support Services from classmates. As the first person in her family to go to college, she qualified for special assistance.

Student Support Services is part of TRIO, a group of federally-funded equal opportunity assistance programs housed at WSU. The program serves first-generation students, low-income students and students with disabilities to help them stay in school and graduate.

Jackson took advantage of everything it offered —  from free printing, books and laptops to tutoring and advising.

“All the obstacles that poverty brings into your life, SSS helped me overcome,” Jackson said.

It was Jackson’s adviser, Vanessa Souriya-Mnirajd — now the associate director of WSU’s Kansas Kids @ GEAR UP program — who gave her advice that made all the difference.

“We were sitting in Vanessa’s office when she said, ‘You’re getting ready to graduate, you’ve conquered all these obstacles, what do you want to do next? Let’s get the weight,’” Jackson said.

Souriya-Mnirajd said Jackson demonstrated a love of learning early on, and was always open about her classes, self-confidence, poverty and other issues she experienced.

“There were times when she wanted to give up,” she said, “but I knew she had the level of commitment necessary to succeed in college, so I kept pushing her to never give up. I remember she opened up about her weight issue, and I told her that if she could overcome that obstacle she could achieve anything that she wanted.”

Today, Jackson has passed state and federal exams qualifying her to become the CEO of a nursing facility. She’s out looking for the right job, but she’s also looking ahead to the next step: returning to WSU to earn a doctorate in community psychology.

Her advice for others who want to improve their situation is simple: take baby steps. Just do something, she said, even something small, every day.

“That really does transform your life,” she said. “If you take advantage of what’s on campus, it really will change you. It changed my life. It changed my children. It was never easy, but it did get easier — and better.”