A Columbia High School senior will be attending one of the top colleges in the United States and moving clear across the country next fall.
Taliyah James has been accepted into Hamilton College, which was ranked the No. 14 liberal arts college in the country according to the 2020 edition of Best Colleges. Hamilton is in upstate New York in Clinton.
James always wanted the opportunity to leave Mississippi and move to a new state so she decided to take a chance and enroll in a program called QuestBridge. The non-profit organization connects top students from low-income backgrounds with leading colleges, according to its website, and allows students to apply 12 colleges for free through its match program. QuestBridge is partners with 40 of the top schools in the nation, including Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, MIT, Yale and more.
This year QuestBridge started with around 15,000 applicants, whittled it down to 5,000 finalists and eventually matched 1,127 students with colleges and a full-ride scholarship, including James with Hamilton. James ranked 12 schools that she wanted to go to, and Hamilton was her sixth choice. James said she researched Hamilton before placing it on her list and believed it was a good choice for her.
James said Columbia’s counselor, Keri Armstrong, told her about QuestBridge, and she wouldn’t have known anything about the program if it wasn’t for Armstrong. It’s been a humbling experience for James to be accepted to one of the top colleges in the country, and she hopes it shows other students in Marion County they have the opportunity to aim higher.
“Anybody can do it really if they want to have that privilege of going out of state or a higher-up school. They could easily do that through QuestBridge,” she said.
James’ mom, Tyronica Averett, said she’s very proud of her daughter and has seen all the work she has put in to get to this point.
“Through all the years since she was in kindergarten, she has made nothing but A’s,” Averett said. “Everything she does I’ve always been supportive and pushing her to keep going. Whatever she had to do I was going to be right there to help her. For her to get in (Hamilton), in the beginning I was like ‘Oh, my baby is going away to New York,’ but I know this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
It will be a drastic change for James, who has only traveled as far north as North Carolina, but she’s excited to be just three hours from New York City and to experience snow on a regular basis. Hamilton’s student base consists of people from all over the country, not just New York, and James is looking forward to meeting people from different backgrounds.
“The environment is going to be very different from Mississippi, and I’m really excited to experience that,” she said.
James added it’s going to take some time to get used to a colder climate and becoming independent without her family.
James will major in biochemistry and pre-med to become a perinatologist, which is a maternal-fetal medicine specialist that helps with high-risk pregnancies. It’s believed her brother, Jakolby, had a stroke when Averett was pregnant with him, and he suffers from cerebral palsy. Averett said it still bothers her to this day to not know with 100% certainty if a stroke caused Jakolby’s cerebral palsy, and James wants to be able to help parents better understand what is going on with their unborn child.
There are four students at Columbia who are tied for the No. 1 spot in the 2020 class, including James, at this point. To be a finalist with QuestBridge students need to score a 27 or better on the ACT, and James scored a 27.
