Oglethorpe University freshman Kimberly Heard was recently featured in a short documentary on Yahoo Finance about managing her full-ride scholarship. In the documentary, Heard and her family discuss her experience working towards college as a first-generation college student.

Oglethorpe freshman Kimberly Heard

Heard has always had a laser-focused motivation towards what she wanted to achieve. By the time she graduated from high school, she already knew that she wanted to work for NASA as an aerospace engineer.

However, in a speech that awarded her Boys & Girls’ Club of Metro Atlanta 2019-2020 Youth of the Year, Heard speaks about her struggle with identity. She recounts being told that the way she spoke and even the way she wore her hair was “distracting” or “unprofessional.” She found her normally extroverted self was fading away.

Through the Boys & Girls Club of Metro Atlanta, she was able to regain the confidence she lost and persevere to work toward a college education. She graduated high school with a 4.1 GPA and, after applying to more than 200 scholarships, was awarded a full scholarship to Oglethorpe, where she is majoring in engineering.

“It was my proudest moment,” Heard proclaims in the documentary. Being able to help her parents, who had also worked tirelessly to put money aside for her college education, felt like “lifting a weight off their shoulders,” she said.

Heard speaks about the importance of managing scholarship money as well. As the first person in her family to go to college, she considers strict financial management a huge priority.

Now at Oglethorpe, Heard is working hard towards achieving her dream of working as an aerospace engineer.

To others who may feel the same way she felt, Heard has this to say: “It doesn’t matter what you look like, sound like or where you come from, because it doesn’t determine your worth.”

Watch a clip from the documentary below. Watch the full video on Yahoo Finance.