 Chelsie Alderette doesn’t remember much about the kidney transplant she underwent when she was eleven years old. Afterwards, her family moved constantly, and she attended five different high schools in Albuquerque. She wasn’t really interested in school, so she dropped out when she was eighteen years old and planned to pursue her GED. Two months later, her body rejected the transplanted kidney, and her life changed entirely. “Dialysis was my whole life,” she explains. She underwent dialysis three days a week and was too exhausted afterwards to think about pursuing any other goals.
About two years later, she moved in with her aunt and uncle, and this “changed [her] whole life.” They encouraged her to go back to school, something she never thought she could do. She saw a Job Corps commercial on TV and decided to make an appointment. On Chelsie’s first day at SIATech, she was completely overwhelmed and thought she would never see graduation day. She had been out of school for years, and the day after she enrolled, she had to take the New Mexico high school exit exam. She was sure that she failed the test. A few months later, she found that she passed all six sections, with a score on the social studies portion that was the highest in the school. She began to think, “Maybe I’m smarter than I thought!” Chelsie began excelling in all of her classes. “I was always scared of grammar and never wanted to write. My first essay in English class was horrible,” she says, laughing. With the encouragement of the English teachers, every essay was better than the last. Now, she receives compliments on her writing, and her teachers have suggested journalism as a possible career path. Although Chelsie was never interested in social studies either, her teacher made the subject exciting to her, and it’s another of her favorites. She will graduate from SIATech in June of 2008, at 23 years old. She plans to study phlebotomy at the local community college. She’s familiar with needles, and “when someone’s hurting”, she says, “I can relate.” Once she’s a practicing phlebotomist, she plans to pursue a liberal arts degree. Chelsie is the epitome of a SIATech success story. Even though she still undergoes dialysis treatments three times a week, she is determined to graduate and to go on to college. When asked what advice she would offer to other SIATech students, she replied, “You design your own destiny. You alone walk the path.” |
