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As for a network, she adds, “Either you leave Clark Atlanta with connections or you leave from Clark Atlanta with connections. It all depends on what you do with those connections.” As Kemryn works on her doctoral degree, she has an eye on the future: Her short-term goal is to become a college president, culminating at an HBCU. “The president is the biggest fundraiser,” she says enthusiastically, “and I want to do that for our HBCUs.” As excited as she is about becoming an HBCU president, she is equally enthusiastic about the step beyond that. After 20 years, the long-term goal is to start an HBCU hub, called Harvesting Tomorrow’s Knowledge, that will serve as a pipeline between HBCUs and African countries to bring African students to HBCUs. It is an idea she has been developing since she first went to Ghana in 2022 as a W.E.B. DuBois scholar. Now a second-year doctoral student, Kemryn has been appointed as the diversity and community fellow for Berkeley’s Office of Graduate Diversity. As she works with the office to conduct policy-informed outreach and community engagement. But that not all—she is also continuing her research, which focuses on policies that affect HBCU enrollment and retention—and conducting focus groups in a Berkeley-funded project that looks at how Project HBCU affects matriculation and access to HBCUs. Kemryn is undoubtedly managing many priorities, but she does not look at them as competing. In fact, for her, the common thread that has woven itself through all her studies and the initiatives she undertakes is how she uses them to support aspiring scholars and HBCUs, especially her own. “I can’t wait to be able to give to my institution like my institution gave to me!” Clark Atlanta literally instilled in me ‘I’ll find a way or make one’—on the lesser, find a way; heavy on the make one.
Fall 2025
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