Jun 24, 2008 8:00 AM

A Lesson in Perseverance: 2008 graduate Shauna Blake Collins

"Higher education," said Shauna Blake Collins, "was not a huge focus in my family. We were more in survival mode, just trying to pay the bills and get through."

Looking at Collins today — a beaming, brand-new graduate of UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine who attended the May 30th commencement ceremony with her proud husband, Demetric, and sons Joshua, 3, and Daniel, 1, by her side — one might not guess she'd had such a rough beginning.

Yet her childhood was anything but easy. When Collins was a baby, her father died in a plane crash, leaving her mother, Beverly, a widow at 24 with three young children to raise. Needless to say, the family struggled, and Collins was 15 when she dropped out of Pasadena High School to work at a dozen different dead-end jobs over the next 12 years.

Bothered by the way her education had abruptly ended, Collins got her GED at age 22 and, five years later, decided on nursing as a career. With each subsequent academic success — L.V.N., A.A., R.N. — she kept reaching for the next step.

"I kept climbing the nursing ladder academically and thinking, 'Well, if I can do this, maybe I can do that,' " Collins recalled. "And all those years, I had been harboring a hope: What if I could be a physician?"

So in 1998, Collins enrolled at Occidental College and completed her bachelor's degree in biology. She married Demetric in 2002 and entered medical school at UCLA the following year. Again, however, it was not an easy road.

"I got pregnant in my first year and had my son in my second year. An unexpected C-section, no less," she said, laughing.

Taking time off to heal from surgery, she resumed her studies in her third year, only to discover a week later that she was pregnant again. "Sitting for boards, 8-1/2 months pregnant ... I'm serious, only my faith in God gets me through life because I don't even know how I got from point A to point B!"

Having recently begun her residency in family medicine at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Woodland Hills, Collins declared that UCLA was the perfect choice.

"UCLA was my ultimate fantasy, and it turned out to be incredible," she said. "They let me have time off to recover from the surgeries, they rearranged my schedule. They really worked with me, and I'm very grateful. Looking back, I couldn't have been anywhere else."

— WENDY SODERBURG

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