A Degree on My Own Terms

The Power of Not Giving Up

If you had asked me before I joined the Peace Corps where I thought I would end up 10 years later, I don’t think I would have guessed that I’d be here, an entrepreneur with a master’s degree and multiple TED Talks to my name.

My path wasn’t linear, and to understand my journey, you have to know where it started.

I grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a community often stained by a reputation for violence, poverty, and incarceration; a place to avoid rather than venture into. In my Caribbean household, education was how you rewrote that narrative. My mother set the example when she went back to school part-time to finish her bachelor’s degree in finance. 

I was an A-minus, B-plus student who struggled with standardized tests. If I ever struggled in a subject, my parents found me a tutor. I took the SAT several times, and in my senior year, most of the colleges I applied to rejected me. Without the money to go away to school, I enrolled at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn.

I was accepted into the honors program on the spot. A global citizenship seminar took me to Salzburg, Austria, to stay in the castle where The Sound of Music was filmed. That week changed how I saw the world, and myself. 

Then, through the Kaplan Leadership Program, I earned a full scholarship to Clark University in Worcester, Mass. and it was there that I fully embraced my international journey. In my last semester at Clark, my political science advisor told me about her Peace Corps service in Jordan. 

Her path to purpose made me want to find my own, and I applied to the Peace Corps not knowing quite what would come of it.

A year later, sitting at my desk at the Massachusetts State House, the email arrived inviting me to serve in Rwanda and I decided to say yes to the unknown. I was excited, and terrified.

At the time, I was a legislative aide for the committee on public health. Saying yes meant resigning to spend two years in a country I had never visited, where I knew no one. Part of me wanted to say no. But I knew that if I did, fear—not purpose—would be the one making the decision.

Service, I learned quickly, wasn’t about me. As a community health volunteer in Rwanda’s Western Province, I was the first Black American at my site, and I saw right away how the media paints flawed narratives on both sides of the world.

A failed library project refocused my work on maternal and child malnutrition and youth development. Learning to embrace what looked like failure clarified my calling: developing future leaders.

I came home with a drive to make that calling a reality, assuming my passion and experience would quickly translate into a job. It didn’t.

What I did know, however, was that education is key to elevation, so I set my sights on graduate school. 

My first application, to Fordham University’s political economy program, was denied. I grew discouraged. Friends and family had been curious about me while I was away, but back home, it was hard to reconnect. Service doesn’t translate itself; turning it into language employers value was my work to do, not theirs.

Eventually I used my Non-Competitive Eligibility, a benefit that lets federal agencies hire returned Volunteers on a fast track, to join the Environmental Protection Agency in Philadelphia as a Community Involvement Coordinator.

Graduate school was still the plan, so in 2018 I enrolled in Rutgers-Camden’s MPA program as a Peace Corps Coverdell Fellow, excited to grow as a leader and pursue my chosen path.

Within my first two weeks, life intervened: my father became ill and passed away unexpectedly. I thought I could continue. Instead, I chose to prioritize my grief and my mental health, and I withdrew. 

At the time, it felt like one more interruption. Now I know that I was choosing my wellbeing over an artificial timeline I had created for myself.

I returned to the EPA and in 2020, I was promoted to headquarters in Washington, D.C. I felt ready to return to school, but Rutgers no longer offered a Coverdell fellowship, so I restarted my grad school research from scratch.

By then, I was running Leaders of the Free World, a nonprofit I co-founded to provide international experiences and leadership development for young Black men in college. We had already led two trips to Ghana and I could see an opportunity developing to grow the initiative in a real way.

For the first time, I wasn’t looking to graduate school to tell me what to do next. I knew what I wanted to build. Four years after Rwanda, I had real work to which I could apply the benefits of a graduate program, and I knew the time was right. 

So I chose a program at the University of Delaware (UDEL), where a master’s in international business combined my international service and leadership experience, and received a full Coverdell scholarship to make it a reality.

I used Leaders of the Free World as a case study in every class; in group work, my classmates and I worked on the group’s international expansion, strategic planning, and marketing plan. Delaware became an incubator for my vision and gave me the support I needed to grow it. 

The letters after my name feel great, but they weren’t the differentiator in my professional path — what I built while earning them was. In 2022, UDEL became an institutional partner with my nonprofit. And a year after graduating, I returned to Delaware to give a TEDx Talk on how my experiences catalyzed my life and career.

My experience showed me that graduate school isn’t always the answer for everyone, at any point in their lives. For me, it became powerful when the program, the season of my life, and the work I wanted to build lined up. 

You are the vehicle. Without clarity and intentionality, any graduate program risks becoming a distraction, even a delay. Before Delaware, I learned to ask two questions: What do I want to get out of this? And, what would set me apart in my life and career?

At that State House desk, I decided I didn’t want to fear making my life decisions. It took a long job search, a tough loss, and a fresh start to learn. It was purpose, not a credential, not fear, that finally solidified my path. And I’m rewarded every day I walk that path.

Lavar Thomas is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Rwanda, 2014–16) and Coverdell Fellow who earned his MS in International Business from the University of Delaware. Author of The Other Side of Letting Go, ICF-certified coach and two-time TEDx speaker, he co-founded Leaders of the Free World to develop young Black men through global leadership experiences.