My sister worked at a housing corporation in Harlem. That address became my entry point into a private Catholic school in Manhattan that my mother believed would give me a better education than what was available in our neighborhood in Brooklyn. She was not wrong about that. What she was navigating, even if she did not name it that way at the time, was a system where access to quality education was determined by where you lived.
What I understand now is that this was not a personal workaround. It was the result of decades of policy decisions that concentrated resources in some communities and stripped them from others, leaving families like mine to figure out how to move within systems that were never designed for us.
So, every weekday in seventh and eighth grade, I took the L train to the 6 train from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Two hours each way. When teachers and nuns and priests asked why I was always late, I made up answers. I was thirteen years old, pretending to live somewhere I did not, making a two-hour commute before school started, and learning early that navigating institutions sometimes means performing a version of yourself that the institution finds acceptable.
People who know me now sometimes ask why I am so disciplined. That commute is part of the answer.
Cristo Rey and What Early Exposure Actually Does
After graduating from Saint Ann's, I was accepted to Cristo Rey, which at the time was a brand-new school. I was part of only the second class to ever walk through those doors, which means everything about the experience was still being figured out in real time.
The model was unusual. Four days a week you were in school, seven in the morning until four in the afternoon. On the fifth day, you went to work at a real corporate job in the city. Not a program. Not a simulation. An actual professional environment where you were expected to show up, perform, and represent the school.
Before any of that started, incoming students spent an intensive period learning how to write a resume, draft a cover letter, fill out a W-2 form, and prepare for a job interview. I was thirteen years old. I had grown up in a single-parent household in Brooklyn. I had friends and family members who had never experienced anything close to this. And here I was, a Black kid from Canarsie, sitting in a room being taught how to present myself to a professional world that had not historically made space for people who looked like me.
My first placement was at a K-12 book publishing company. I answered phones, processed orders, managed data entry, filed documents. I was one of the only Black people in the building and I felt that immediately. I did not have language for what I was experiencing at the time. I just knew I felt out of place, and I also knew I was going to do the work anyway.
My second year I worked at a law firm in Midtown Manhattan. I filed client cases, organized records, and served as a cameraman for a television show called The Common Law. Before every take I would call out the countdown out loud: five, four, then mouth the words three, two, one, and he would go. A fourteen-year-old from Brooklyn counting down a lawyer for his TV show. I did not know how unusual that was. I just thought it was the job.
What those two years gave me was not just work experience. They gave me a physical understanding that I could exist in professional spaces, that I could navigate them, perform in them, and hold my own in them. That kind of embodied confidence is not something you can teach in a classroom. You have to be in the room.
Canarsie High School and What I Saw When I Walked Through the Metal Detector
At the end of my time at Cristo Rey, I was asked if I wanted to stay. Staying would have meant repeating the grade. Out of pride, and with the particular logic of a teenager who did not want to be known as someone who was held back, I chose to leave.
I enrolled at Canarsie High School. My older brother had gone there. In my mind it made sense.
The first thing I noticed was the metal detector. Every morning, walking through it, there was something in my body that registered danger even when the day turned out fine. Canarsie had a reputation, and it was not built around academics. There were gangs. There were fights. I saw a student attack a teacher once, and the teacher won. I watched people skip class regularly, walk in late without consequence, treat school as something to be endured rather than engaged.
And I showed up every day on time, sat in my seat, and paid attention. Not because I was exceptional. Because Cristo Rey and Saint Ann's had already taught me how to be a student in a way that Canarsie simply had not gotten around to. I had a resume at sixteen. I knew what a cover letter was. I had worn business casual to a Manhattan office while most of my new classmates had never had a reason to think about any of that.
My teachers noticed. The vice principal noticed. A teacher named Ms. Timmons took a particular interest in me and pushed me toward a summer work program. Because of her, I started working at the New York City Department of Education during my junior and senior years. And because of that job, I met Carnela Dimanche.
Carnela was my supervisor. She became my mentor. She became something close to a second mother. She is the person who taught me how to apply to college. She helped me write my application essays. She walked my mother and me through the FAFSA step by step, explaining every field, making sure we did not leave anything on the table. Without Carnela, I am not sure I apply to college at all, at least not with the information and confidence I needed to do it well.
I think about that often. Not as a feel-good story about one remarkable woman, though she is remarkable. I think about it as a systems question. What if I had not landed that job? What if Ms. Timmons had not noticed me? What if the chain of small interventions that led me to Carnela had been broken anywhere along the way?
What This Means for Higher Education Today
I am telling this story not because it is inspiring, though I hope parts of it are. I am telling it because every element of it reflects a structural failure that higher education continues to underfund and underaddress.
A child should not have to lie about where he lives to access a quality education. A mother should not have to find creative workarounds to redlining just to give her son a chance. A high school student should not have to luck into the right mentor at a summer job in order to understand that college is an option and learn how to apply.
These are not personal failures. They are policy failures. And for those of us working in higher education access and admissions, they have direct implications for how we do our work.
The students who arrive at our institutions having navigated school systems like the ones I navigated have already demonstrated something extraordinary. They have persisted through under-resourced environments. They have developed a kind of discipline and adaptability that standardized metrics were never designed to capture. They have, in many cases, been their own case managers, advocates, and navigators through systems that were not built to help them succeed.
These patterns do not end at college access. They shape who sees graduate education as possible, who applies, and who is prepared to navigate it. By the time students reach the point of considering advanced degrees, many of the same structural gaps have already compounded. Exposure, advising, and institutional translation do not suddenly appear at the graduate level. They are built, or not built, much earlier.
What they often have not had is a Carnela. Someone who knew how the systems worked and was willing to take the time to translate them. Higher education can be that for more students if it chooses to be. The question is whether institutions are willing to invest in the human infrastructure, the mentors, the counselors, the access professionals from communities like mine, that makes that translation possible at scale.
Career development programs embedded in high schools, real partnerships between higher education institutions and under-resourced secondary schools, and sustained outreach to communities where guidance already exists but institutional connection does not, these are not new ideas. The gap is not innovation. The gap is investment and consistency.
We already know what works. We have not committed to doing it at scale.
Every high school student should have access to a dedicated college advisor by tenth grade, not as a luxury, but as a baseline support. Admissions offices should be investing just as intentionally in pre-application engagement as they do in applicant yield, because by the time a student applies, many of the structural gaps have already taken hold.
If we are serious about equity, we cannot rely on chance encounters with the right mentor at the right time. We have to build systems where that support is expected, resourced, and scaled.
The L Train and the 6 Train
I still think about that commute sometimes. A seventh grader on the L to the 6, two hours each way, lying about where he lived so he could get to a school his mother believed in, in a city that had already decided which neighborhoods deserved good schools and which ones did not.
That kid made it. But he should not have had to work that hard just to get to the starting line.
Higher education cannot fix everything that happened before students arrive at our doors. But we can be honest about what those students carried to get here. We can build institutions that see that clearly, value it honestly, and refuse to let another generation of students from Canarsie have to find their own Carnela by accident.
The pipeline starts long before the application. It is past time we took responsibility for more of it.
Rakim D. Williams is an admissions leader at a research university, where he leads equity-focused recruitment and enrollment strategy. A first-generation college graduate from Brooklyn, New York, his work focuses on access, admissions, and the human infrastructure that shapes who gets to pursue higher education.
