Father & Daughter Will Graduate Together From NCCU Saturday

DURHAM, NC – A father and daughter will graduate together on Saturday, Dec. 14, from North Carolina Central University’s Masters of Public Administration Program. They don’t know yet if they’ll walk across the stage separately or together; either way, the moment is one neither expected a few years ago.

Nelson Lee, 53, knew from an early age that his daughter Jasmine Lee, 26, would be fine educationally when she received her first B in middle school.

“Looking back on my educational experiences in school I would have been dancing The Jig with Bs,” Lee said. “So, when you cried in middle school to get that B, I knew right then, ‘Ok. She’s gonna be alright,’ because you’ve always cared about your educational advancement and you’ve always been somebody to be diligent. You graduated with honors from the MPA program. And I’ve always been impressed with that. Even when you were in middle school I really admired your tenacity and diligence toward gaining knowledge. And I never – for one moment with Jasmine –worried  about her educational pursuit.”

Jasmine, a Durham native, graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014 with a Bachelor’s of Art in Psychology and an  Education minor. After graduation, she had plans of becoming a high school counselor and was a college advisor through the Carolina College Advising Core in Pitt and Wilson county. But Jasmine realized another avenue she could pursue.

 “I noticed there were a lot of teenage parents at the high schools that I worked at as a college advisor,” Jasmine said, “and I noticed that a lot of them did not have adequate college access resources.  There were resources tailored to them being parents, but not necessarily preparing them to go to college or to really find a substantial career after high school.

“So I realized, I want to open a non-profit where I provide resources to teenage parents so I knew I didn’t necessarily have to go back graduate school to do that, people you know don’t have to have a master’s to open up a non-profit but I knew that I needed more training and an educational background for myself to understand what it meant to run a non-profit and what it meant to be a public servant.”

Nelson, a Garysburg, N.C. native,  originally started at North Carolina A&T State University in 1984, but he left after two years and then he went back to college at NCCU in 1992 for about a year. Through the “Endzone Initiative” at NCCU – an interdisciplinary degree designed for non-traditional students with credit hours to complete their degree through online and traditional classroom courses – he returned to N.C. Central in 2014 to complete his undergraduate degree.

“My story is one that the graduate program itself was the conglomeration of me completing my bachelor’s degree,” Nelson said. “Throughout my years after I stopped going to school and raising a family,  I always knew that I would eventually go back to college and complete my degree. But the actual reason for not only completing the bachelor’s but completing the master’s was my desire to position myself to be able to make an effective, positive change in the lives of other people.”

Jasmine had just moved back in with her parents before she started her master’s degree at N.C. Central, but she didn’t know Nelson would be joining her at the time.

“I thought he was kind of joking,” Jasmine said, “and he was telling me, ‘Jas Imma apply and Imma start me a grad school program.’ So I was like, “Ok! Come on Daddy!” And so I’m blessed I’ve been able to witness my dad’s transformation. Just to see him and know the things that our family went through some years ago and to see where he has allowed God to bring him to now is definitely a testament of our faith and a testament of  how good God is because five years ago if you would have told me that me and my dad would have been graduating together from graduate school I would tell you that would be a lie.”

Nelson plans on starting a nonprofit for 18-25-year-old males that teach life and technical skills, operative training and financial literacy. Moreover, he believes that Saturday will be a victory for more than himself and Jasmine.

“They say it takes a village to raise a child,” Nelson said, but it also takes a village to help a person in their life to move forward and that line of people in our lives family church family friends that their diligence in supporting us is actually gonna walk across that stage as well. the time that they have spent the prayers that they have said encouragement that they have given us.”

The commencement ceremony is at 9 a.m. on Saturday at McDougald-McLendon Arena.

“It’s gonna be a really special day,” Lee said. “I was telling people, ‘I’m just ready for them to unlock the doors on December 14th so I can get in there.’ But it’s gonna be really special, and I honestly wouldn’t want to spend this time and celebrate this with anybody else. … It’s really the beginning of the rest of our lives. Our lives are gonna change after December 14th greatly for our family and individually. So I’m just excited for it to get here.”

For more information on NCCU Winter Commencement, visit https://web.nccu.edu/commencement/