NVC Students Overcome Obstacles

This year’s graduation brings many success stories of Northwest Vista College students overcoming hardships to achieve their goals.

Two stories highlighted – thanks to NVC advisors Kristal Eaker and Valerie Somerville – show what our students can achieve through their own motivation and a little push from NVC faculty and staff.

Former Marine Albert “Bert” Jimenez found therapy in exercise and managed to lose over 100 pounds. He’s now helping veterans and recently completed the Boston Marathon.

NVC graduate, Steffyn Nowak, became a teen mom through a sexual assault and is on her way to being pre-med at the University of Incarnate Word.

Albert “Bert” Jimenez

Just 10 days after graduating from high school, Albert “Bert” Jimenez was in a grueling U.S. Marines boot camp in San Diego. Three weeks after that, he found himself in Iraq at the age of 18.

Four years later and two deployments to Iraq, Bert left the Marines with a heavy toll. PTSD and the trauma of seeing close friends die in a war zone impacted his mental and physical health. He didn’t know how to pick up his life after the Marines and turned to heavy drinking. Read more here.

Steffyn Nowak

NVC student Steffyn Nowak was relentless in reaching her dream despite life dealt her one too many blows.

At the age of 15, she was raped and had a baby from the assault. Right before she was set to testify against her assailant, his family kidnapped her and took her to Mexico and Guatemala for six months. When she came back to the states, she soon dropped out of high school and lived in her car for several months.

Several years go by and she’s happily married with two kids. In spite of all this tragedy, she always wanted to go to college and be a doctor, but she thought her dream was over because she was a full-time mom to two young kids. Her mother took care of her older daughter. Read more here.