Allison Bates A Sort of Hybrid
I have always felt like an outsider. I have never once felt like I belonged to something or someone. Thinking of this has brought tears to my eyes many times. At every stage in my life so far, I have had to deal with my race and what it means to be both black and white. I have faced one test after another, and each time I have looked to my siblings and within myself to get through.
We never talked about race in my family. When I look back now, that seems strange, because race played such a powerful role in our everyday lives. I didn’t even understand what race was until I was older. As I grew up, this inability to locate what I was experiencing led to a lot of confusion around my identity. In the neighborhoods where I lived, I could see white people and black people and brown people and yellow people, but I never placed my parents in those categories. I never saw my parents’ race, and so my mother wasn’t my “white” mom and my father wasn’t my “black” dad until I was probably thirteen or fourteen. I remember emerging moments of awareness: “Oh, yeah, my mom’s white, that’s weird.” I recall wondering as a five-year-old, while waiting at the bus stop in Los Angeles with my sister and my mom, why people looked at us funny. I knew they were talking about us. Then there were the questions from other kids: “Are you adopted?” “Is that your mom?” “Why don’t you look like her?” Over time I became embarrassed and found that it was easier to say I was adopted than to explain to my fifth-grade classmates why my mom was in fact my “real” mom.
To this day, the most frequent place of identity discomfort has been the checkout line at the grocery store. The cashiers never realized that my mother and I were together, and there would always be this awkward moment when I would have to say, “Oh, I’m with her.” In some strange way, these cashiers had it right: I was always “with” my mom, but in many respects I was never really part of her. For most of our lives we lived in the same world, and yet our worlds were completely separate. I am black and she is white. We share genes but not racial categories. We stand in lines together, but the people around us don’t realize that we even know each other, much less that we’re mother and daughter.
My multiracial identity thus has largely been constructed by the reactions of others while I stood in lines waiting for buses or checking out groceries, and by the inevitable introductions at my school’s parent-teacher nights. I had to learn about the history and complexity of race before I could recognize my own place in its ever-evolving categories. I am still trying to carve out my own space, because for many mixed-race people, the space that describes our particular racial identity simply does not exist or is in a constant state of flux.
I often wonder if my mom ever grappled with how to check the “race box” when it came to the forms and documents she surely had to fill out for all of her kids. Which one did she choose: white, black, or other? Or did she write in something else? I don’t really know the answer to these questions because I’ve never asked, which reveals a large gap in my understanding of how my mother sees herself in her own family. I have often felt foreign and out of place when I am with her side of the family, which leads me to wonder if my mother feels uncomfortable about being the only white person in our immediate and extended family. Even though I am technically half white, I don’t feel it; I don’t even know if I’m supposed to. I have no concept of what it must be like never really to have to be aware of your difference. I think that is because, as a society, we see whiteness as racelessness.
As I grew up and came to identify myself as black, as having and being a race, my mother sort of got left behind. To me she didn’t have a race because she was white. When I was in high school, this changed, as I began to see my mother as white and therefore “other.” I became intrigued by black history in America. I read Martin and Malcolm and Baldwin. I joined my high school “diversity club” and got involved in projects aimed at eliminating racism. I even helped coordinate my school assemblies that were geared toward highlighting and celebrating the civil rights movement. All this began to make me hyperaware of race and difference, so that I gradually began to notice my mother’s whiteness much more than I ever had before. I often stereotyped her words and choices in the same way that I had so eagerly urged my classmates not to do. So over time, as I became black, my mother became white.
As I look back now, it’s hard to know if this was mainly due to being a teenager and naturally not always seeing eye to eye with my mother, or if I had simply accepted fully that I was black and therefore would always be different from her. I do think that my being black and her being white made it easier for me to assume that our misunderstandings were related to our racial differences rather than our generational ones. As a mixed-race adolescent, I had all the normal challenges to navigate in the ever-changing mother-child relationship, plus the burden of understanding my own racial identity as a mixed-race woman perceived as black by the larger world—a challenge my mother was incapable of helping me resolve.
My mother is a part of me, and yet so totally separate and different from who I am. There is a connection missing; it’s almost as if there is this person I know but don’t feel related to. I don’t identify at all with my mom (or my dad for that matter), which creates a strange dynamic. Lots of kids have difficulty relating to their parents, but this is different. There is no way my white mother can conceptualize what it’s like to be a young black woman in society. In turn, I cannot conceptualize what it’s like for her as a white woman married to a black man and having a bunch of mixed-race children. For both of us, then, I imagine there is a sense of mystery and even bewilderment at the thought that our races have created this space between us.
Sometimes I wonder if the alienation I experience in my relationship with my mom is similar to or reflective of the relationship she has with her mom. There is a separation between them, too, a distance and tension that is so obvious to me because I can recognize the longing and pain my mother feels toward her. It is telling that I really don’t know much about my mom’s past. She has created a series of mental pictures that I use to imagine what her own life was like before she had me. Strangely, there are no photos of her childhood, except for one of her in the third or fourth grade. Bright red hair frames her freckled face; she wears a flowered dress with a green collar that was made by her mother. I used to keep that four-by-four-inch photo taped inside my treasure chest, and every time I opened it, I would stare at the picture of that little girl who seemed so unfamiliar to me. I would look at her lips that failed to form a smile and those eyes that seemed to be focused on something else, and wonder what she was thinking. What was her life like? What did her lack of a smile say about her childhood? Looking back now, I realize that photo in many ways sums up my understanding of my mother as a young girl. Lonely, longing for a connection with her parents, finding solace in the animals she grew up around on the family farm, struggling to close the distance between her sister and two brothers, only to resign herself to the fact that she was too chubby or stupid or afraid to measure up to them.
My mother’s disconnection from her own family only grew wider as she got older. Unlike her sister, she loved art, not math, she got C’s rather than A’s like her little brother, and she loved horses instead of the cattle her father eagerly tended for most of his life. So when she went away to Brazil to be a missionary and then moved to Los Angeles to go to nursing school but instead opened an art studio, she truly became an outsider in her own family, the one nobody liked to talk about. This legacy would be passed on to her children. Furthermore, I think that because she was an outsider in her own family, she could not protect her children from having that same feeling.
I think that when my mom married my dad, it was the last straw for her family. She went instantly from being considered weird to seeming crazy. How could a red-haired, freckled-faced lady from a small town in California marry a black man—and an African at that! My father’s culture as much as his color must have sent my mother’s family into utter shock, because my father isn’t just a black man, he is BLACK. His skin is so dark that it would be almost impossible to distinguish the black hair on his head from the rest of his face if it weren’t for the tiny curls protruding from his scalp. He also has a heavy accent so distinctive that the minute he opens his mouth in public, he is transformed from black man to foreigner.
I’ve always felt more like an outsider around my mom’s family than if we were a group of strangers. Our cousins look like the kids you find in a J. C. Penney catalog. Their families are perfect on the outside: their parents have good jobs and they live in big beautiful homes. Grandma had pictures of the other grandchildren at the different stages of their lives on display in her front room, but only one picture of us; a group shot of us sitting on a couch with forced smiles on our faces was tucked back in the corner. Their pictures lined the bookshelf like a treasured journey through time, but where were we? Guests at my grandmother’s house probably assumed that we were family friends or neighbor kids. She never had to acknowledge us outwardly, never had to claim us as her own. Maybe that made things a little bit easier for her, but it certainly did not for my mother.
I have only a few memories of my parents together. One that stands out is when they were trying to move us out of our cramped two-bedroom apartment and into a new house. We kids could not have been more thrilled, as we hated our apartment. The only place for us to play was the parking lot, where cars raced in and out and the cruel asphalt left bloodied bruises every time we fell. We all dreamt of living in our own home one day. We would each have our own room, and there would be a huge kitchen where my mom could cook dinner while we played in the grassy yard with the golden retriever we kids so desperately wanted. The moment finally arrived when my mother announced that she had found the perfect place for us to live and was ready to bring my father and all of us kids to see it. I believe that there are a few significant moments that shape our lives, and this was about to become one of them. My mom made us dress up in our fancy holiday outfits. My sister and I put on our big pink dresses with the purple bow in front, while my brother carefully slipped on his black suede shoes, which perfectly matched his pressed black suit, crisp white shirt, and tie. My parents also put on their best outfits. These were the nicest clothes we owned, and they came out only on major occasions. This was huge.
As we drove out of our run-down, crowded neighborhood, things finally seemed to be looking up for us. After about an hour, my mom told my dad to park in front of a modest yet beautiful brick home with a small yard. The realtor she was working with was not there yet, so my mother got out of the car and waited on the doorstep. The rest of us sat in the van, barely able to contain our excitement. I remember my dad’s eyes because they were beaming with pride. This was going to be our house; it was affordable, lovely, and safe. The realtor arrived and met my mother on the doorstep, who then turned and gestured for us to come to her. We threw open the door and dashed toward her, our excitement and anticipation making us fly. We arrived at the door, ready to pounce in and claim our territory, when we all turned to look at the realtor’s face.
“You know, I don’t have the keys to the house,” she said.
“But they are right there in your hand,” my mother replied.
“These keys are not for you. I just can’t give them to you, it would be unacceptable,” she stuttered.
“But . . . ” was all my mother could mutter as she lowered her head and stared at the concrete steps.
At the time I could not understand the significance of that moment. My parents had experienced blatant racism before, but this was the first time the entire family was part of it. We were all there in that moment, our inadequate group not worthy of living in such a place. My mother stood speechless, my father cursed in anger under his breath. We kids could sense that something was not right. The air seemed different, the excitement was gone, and it was almost as if an element of fear had set in. We had never seen our parents in that state, our mother so stunned she could not form a sentence, our father completely helpless with no room to negotiate. We all stood there motionless. My brother tugged on the bottom of my mother’s dress. “Mama,” he said as he pointed toward the door. “Mine. Mine room.” My father scooped him up from the doorstep and headed to the car. My mother put us in the van, shut the door, and just as quickly as we had arrived, we were gone. No one spoke on the ride home. No music was played on the radio, and my mom did not play our signature car game of pointing out all the yellow cars that buzzed past us. We were a family shocked into silence. It was as if that skinny little lady with her pinstriped blazer and plum lipstick had taken her magic wand and rendered my family powerless, meaningless, and unworthy. It hurts every time I think about that day, knowing that my proud father was reduced to a babbling servant, unable to find the words to make that house door open, simply because we were an unacceptable combination of white and black.
I think that in many ways my parents did not know each other; their ideas and dreams were very different. My mom lay awake nights wondering how to feed four growing kids, while my dad was contemplating how to support an entire village back home. Being a mixed-race couple in 1980s Los Angeles was not easy. It was as if by being together they lost the higher status that would have been theirs had they been apart. I still do not know all the details surrounding their divorce, but one day my dad left, and it was over a decade before I saw him again. When my parents divorced, I was too young to understand what was going on. One minute my father was there and the next he was not. It was something we got used to quickly. I was so young that it soon became normal to me that my father was not around. We never really asked my mother what happened or where our dad went, and I’m not so sure she would have had an answer for us.
Things had not always been easy even when my dad was around, and once he was out of the picture, things became very difficult financially. My mother had not worked since my youngest sister was born, and finding work with four kids under the age of six was not easy. She had supplemented my father’s income by occasionally selling some of her crafts. My mom would later tell us that he often went overseas for weeks at a time, making business deals and visiting family, and he often did not leave my mom with enough money to get by. So she had created her own bag of tricks. She made crafts to sell on the corner outside our apartment and made a lot of our clothes in order to save money, and sold some of the clothes she made as well.
We were always dependent on the generosity of other people to get by. As hard as my mom tried, without a college education there was just no way she could make enough money to house, clothe, and feed five people. So one day she packed up what would fit in the back of our van and headed off to live with her parents, who were settled in a nice suburb right outside Sacramento, California. My grandparents had a house with three bedrooms, and we took over two of them and then some. It went from being a nice spacious place to a cramped living environment, but it was still the nicest house and neighborhood we had ever lived in. We lived there for about a year while my mother went back to school to get her nursing certificate. I think our presence shocked the quiet white neighborhood. We always felt we were different because we were poor and our parents weren’t together, but my mom never talked to us about race. I don’t know if she chose not to because she was trying to protect us, or whether she was just not aware of how deeply it would impact us. The confusion only deepened when my mother remarried.
My mother and siblings and I had moved out of my grandmother’s house and were living in a moss-green duplex with a mulberry tree out front. We were all sitting around the kitchen table, and the morning sun beaming through the windows created a sepia effect. We were eating cereal when my mom announced to the four of us that she was getting remarried. I was so stunned that I dropped my metal spoon onto the linoleum. I can still recall the clang it made as it hit the floor, and it still makes my skin crawl. I was reacting less to the fact that my mother was getting married than to the man she was going to marry, Lenny. I despised him. He was mean and scary and incredibly intimidating.
Lenny was my stepdad for eight long, exhausting years that I would like to forget. I have tried to bury all recollection of that period and have so deeply repressed those memories that even now I’m startled when I recall that part of my life. We never speak about Lenny. In fact, his name is almost like a curse word. Lenny was old. His skin was tight and rough and covered in so many tattoos that he didn’t look so much white as green. He had red hair scattered across his arms and legs and wore big yellow glasses with lenses so thick that it looked like his eyeballs were protruding from their sockets. Before we came into Lenny’s life, he had fathered numerous children and had even more criminal convictions. He was prone to cursing and farting and burping out loud. I just found him, well, nasty. And I think this nastiness extended to the way he treated my siblings and me. He did not care for us and it showed. He went out of his way not to show up at our school or sporting functions. He derided us for making simple mistakes, and whenever he addressed my mother about us, it was always “your daughter” or “your kids.” The few daily interactions we had consisted of him yelling at us and then marching off to the garage, where he would lock himself up for the night. It was a terrible and sometimes terrifying way to live.
Lenny was one of the few adult white men I had met up to that point. Therefore, I often associated his behavior with that of all white people. Looking back, I wonder if part of his obvious contempt for us had to do with our being black. On the few occasions we went out together as a family, it was always awkward. I mean, here were these four little black kids with these white adults, so the natural assumption was that either they were our neighbors taking us out for a meal or they had graciously adopted us. As a mixed-race child and a young woman trying to navigate a racialized world, I always felt out of place in that situation—feelings of displacement and disruption that would come to permeate my life.
My mother finally divorced Lenny and our family moved away, hoping to leave those bad memories behind. We next settled in a small town in western Washington State. My mom had a friend who let us live in a small trailer sitting in the driveway. The trailer was so tiny that we had to turn the bathtub into a sleeping area for my youngest sister. I remember how horrified I was at living in a trailer in the front yard of a beautiful home in a fancy neighborhood. I could imagine people thinking, “Look at those poor blacks who cannot afford a home.” One of the worst moments was when the girl next door, who was the same age as me, pulled her brand-new BMW into the driveway as we emerged from the tattered trailer with our laundry. She took off her sunglasses and looked us up and down in disgust. I would later run into her again, in class.
I wound up attending a high school that was predominantly middle-class white and had immense resources. I struggled with making new friends because I resented the sense of privilege and entitlement of many of my peers. And while I became very involved in activities such as volleyball and diversity club, I always felt like an outsider, as though I was watching everything going on around me in slow motion. In spite of these obstacles I excelled, in part because I was determined to overcome the difficulties of my youth, but primarily because I had a couple of outstanding teachers who believed in my ability to change things for the better. They were the ones who introduced me to the meaning and value of education and encouraged me to apply to college.
In order to understand the person I am and will become, one has to understand the relationship I have with my father. He is as temperamental and cruel as he is friendly and smart. He is a controversial figure, one who is difficult to define and get to know. My dad came back into our lives again when I was seventeen. Only now, at age twenty-two, am I really getting to know him. One day at the beginning of my junior year in high school, my mother announced that my father was coming from California to visit us. We were all shocked because we had not seen him since we were little kids and had spoken to him only a few times on the phone since then. So one day he showed up and he hasn’t left since. Neither he nor my mother ever explained to us that he was staying permanently. They also never mentioned anything about getting remarried, but I came home from school one day to find they had gotten married again. They never communicated anything to us.
I had never really known my father. When he returned, my siblings and I were nearly adults, so we did not need or want this man who had abandoned us to be our live-in father again. His presence was the ultimate clash in cultures, and our home life became increasingly tense with each passing day. I had become so used to being the second breadwinner in the family that I resented his authority. I worked two jobs and bought a car. I took my siblings to school and to their afterschool activities and picked them up. I got the groceries and helped everyone with their homework. I had essentially assumed a role this man was now trying to take back, although he had done nothing to earn it.
My father is a complex man. He has been in the United States longer than he lived in his native Ghana, yet he is still a stranger here, an outsider. The tribal scars on his face are embedded deep in his cheeks, a holding place for the pain of his past. He is ebony black and stands out in the daylight like an eyesore, so he can’t be missed. When evening approaches, he fades into the colors of the night sky, his face disappearing. Only the round whites of his eyes stand out like glowing lights. His eyes, too, are dark; there is no distinction between his iris, pupil, and retina, and they seem to merge into one dark circle. His hair is as black as his skin; only the aging gray strands stand out. His three oldest children tower over him. Even without ever seeing my father, you would know he is a foreigner by his heavy accent. He can be kind, and is actually quite friendly and outgoing. In fact, one of the things I admire most about him is his ability and willingness to talk to or befriend anyone. But we are still so different from him and look nothing like him, and it is hard to believe we are his kids. The only thing that ties us to him in public is that we all are black.
My siblings and I had grown up black. We were black American kids, not African or Ghanaian. We lived in black neighborhoods and went to black schools. Black people did our hair, and we went to a black church. There was nothing African about us. My father was born and raised in Ghana. He came to the United States when he was in his late twenties, but he never really settled down here and often took trips back home. He is still not a U.S. citizen. Like many Africans, he has a negative view of blacks in America, a view he soon began to project onto us, his “black” children. He felt that we were too lazy, that we did not study long enough or work hard enough. Nothing we did was ever good enough for him. It was as if he was trying to strip that black identity away from us and turn us into the West African children he never had. One of the ways he tried to do this was to send us to a Ghanaian church. During the service they did not speak one word of English. Every song, sermon, and statement was in the Ghanaian language of Twi-Fante. All of us—especially my mother, who was the only white woman in the building—felt like complete outsiders. We had no real business being there, and everyone seemed to know it except my father. We continued to have clashes with him, but once he saw how successful we had become and how well we were doing in school and athletics, he backed off a little and slowly began to embrace us. It would take several more years, however, before we began to embrace him, even in a small way.
I was in Los Angeles when I received notice of my acceptance to college. My twin sister was accepted to the same college, and so we shared the experience. I had no expectations because I had never been to New England and was unfamiliar with the school. When I arrived on campus, I dove right into my classes and many of the activities going on around me. I even joined the rugby team. I became a history major and joined the business club. I went on service trips to New Orleans and Washington, D.C. And yet I also found my college incredibly isolating at times. It is an elite institution, and the individuals who wield power here are white men, and though not always noticeable, these characteristics permeate the culture and create a climate that is often intolerable.
My fascination with Africa started when I was five or six. Whenever my father’s relatives came around or my family went to the homes of my dad’s friends or to church functions, I would stare at the women in their magnificently colorful head wraps and scarves. I would listen to them speak, yearning to know what was being said. These people were strange and unfamiliar to me, and yet I was captivated by their culture—which in many ways was supposed to be mine but, sadly, was not. The smells of fuw fuw and fried plantain were as much a part of my early childhood as chicken fritters and pizza. These smells and sights and sounds helped me to frame a wider picture of what Africa must be like. At these gatherings I felt connected and yet disconnected, but I always paid attention to every detail, meticulously recounting names and faces. And this was how I came to imagine Africa.
When I got older and began learning about African history and society, I often felt confused. The images and stories of abject poverty and disease, of scandal, corruption, and sheer desperation were directly counter to my initial experiences and understanding of the continent. Surely the people I had encountered and the joy for life they exhibited could not have been born in a place filled with such melancholy. There was a conflict between the Africa I had experienced and the Africa in my textbooks and on TV. My experiences as a child framed my understanding and, later, my passion for the continent.
I realize now that this intense interest was rooted in something much deeper: my desire to know my father. My dad left my family when I was very young, and the things that I knew about him and the memories I had were very limited. Therefore my desire to learn about the continent and to travel there stemmed from a profound longing to settle my feelings toward my father and my own racial identity. I thought if I could just go to Africa I would have some sort of revelation that would free me from the questions and self-doubts that I held inside. In many ways, Africa served as a fantasy destination to which I dreamed of escaping to get away from all of my problems. I was attempting to locate the misplaced fragments of my identity.
Growing up mixed-race, I grappled not only with having a white mother but also—and probably more significantly—with attempting to figure out where my hybrid nature fit into the black/white binary of America’s racial categorization. Particularly while in high school, I struggled with whether I was “black enough” or if I was really African American, since I could not trace my black lineage back to slavery. These musings were only compounded by my experiences of marginalization and subjugation. I say all of this to provide a backdrop for understanding how incredibly meaningful it was for me when I actually got to go to Africa during college. I earned a traveling grant from my college, which made the trip possible.
The first thing I remember when my twin sister and I stepped off the plane in Accra, Ghana, was the way the hot air stuck to my skin like molasses. This feeling would permeate the trip, and I never became comfortable with it. As my sister and I walked across the airport tarmac, we looked at each other and smiled. We had arrived. Over a lifetime I had built up so many vague expectations about what I would learn about myself from traveling to Africa. What I discovered primarily is that it’s rather hard to find something if you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for, but it eventually occurred to me that this was not the end of my search or the fulfillment of a dream. This was a beginning.
Any delusions I had about not being culture-shocked soon dissipated. I was often reminded of my outsider status during my three-month stay in Ghana. I was constantly reminded that, in the eyes of Ghanaians, I would never be one of them. I found that it was not my status as an American but my skin color that made me stand out. I came to realize that being perceived as a racial other was nearly impossible to escape, even in the country of my father’s birth. Wherever we went in Ghana, people would shout obroni, which roughly translates to “white person.” Even the children at the orphanage where we worked refused to call us by our names and instead always called us obroni. I remember thinking, “I went halfway around the world back to my black roots, only to be called a white girl.” This was the most frustrating aspect of being in Ghana—more frustrating than the bucket showers and the endless traffic and the merciless mosquitoes. It hurt even though it was not meant to, because I felt that I was being rejected and that my identity was more confused and wounded than ever. My entire life up to that point had been a series of internal struggles between black and white, between multiracial and raceless, between African and American. I learned that the racial concepts of “mixed” and “bi-” and “multi-” are just as unfamiliar in Ghana as they are in America. As always, I felt out of place.
I realize now that all those feelings were inevitable. After all, I did not speak the language fluently, I found much of the food to be unpleasant, and I was constantly harassed for money and dates and photos. All the hopes and dreams of my childhood had raised my expectations to an impossible level. I came to realize that part of my desire to go to Ghana came from an incessant need to belong and be accepted, to have my differences be the norm. Instead, being in Ghana only confirmed my abnormality. I was initially very disappointed and upset, as I hadn’t anticipated that my racial status as a sort of hybrid would be such a big deal.
My trip to Africa highlighted a bizarre dichotomy: I was black in America and white in Africa. I was always one or the other; nowhere was I both. Moreover, I did not like being seen as a white person in Africa because I understood some of the connotations and historical associations that came with that. And whereas I was considered poor in the United States, I was privileged in Ghana. Where I had been marginalized at home, I now became powerful. All of this was confusing and unfamiliar to me.
While my struggles with the way I was racially identified were certainly palpable, they did not define my experience or hinder my ability to explore and enjoy my surroundings during my three months in Africa. I went to soccer matches in Accra, traveled to fish markets in Tema, explored the forests of Kumasi, walked through slave castles in Cape Coast, and met, for the first time, my father’s relatives in the village of Mim. Traveling to my father’s village stands as a powerful moment in my life because I began to see why my father is the way he is. By rooting myself in his culture, I uprooted my previous misconceptions about who he was. I came to see him in the shopkeepers, government officials, and taxi drivers I encountered. Witty and smart and driven—these were the qualities my father shared with his countrymen. Meeting his family—my family—for the first time was a startling experience. I was amazed and moved to see how much my twin sister and I looked like our great aunt. For the first time in my life I was able to look at members of my extended family and see myself. What we didn’t share in language we made up for in gestures and facial expressions and unspoken understanding. For the first time I felt at ease and had a sense of belonging.
The trip to Africa was an important part of my college experience and my evolving identity. It’s fair to say that my college years transformed my identity. I became much more self-aware and sure of myself. But I also struggled to navigate the narrow lines between my race, my gender, and my social class. To deal with these conflicts more effectively, I became involved with the Afro-American Society, which became both a haven and a source of immense tension for all the reasons implicit in my story. As I prepare to graduate from college, I do so with an appreciation for what I’ve learned and how far I’ve come. I have been shaped by the people I’ve met and by the places I have gone. I carry with me the transformative experiences and the insights gained from challenges I have worked hard to overcome. I have learned these lessons from both my mistakes and my victories, and will surely carry them with me for a lifetime.
Allison moved back to California after Dartmouth to work for a large tech company for several years. She is now working for one of the fastest-growing start-ups in Silicon Valley and establishing a career in the world of technology.