For much of my life, higher education felt simultaneously necessary and not made for someone like me. I grew up in a low-income community in southeastern Kentucky and became the first person in my family to pursue higher education. Education was presented as a pathway to escaping poverty, bigotry, and the religion that was held over my heart. As such, education represented immense possibility. But pursuing it also meant entering spaces whose expectations, language, and unwritten rules I had to learn on my own. Early in my undergraduate days, I learned, quite painfully, that access to education and belonging within education are not the same thing. I pursued mathematics. I loved the certainty of it, the challenge of it, and the feeling of finally understanding something that had once seemed impossible. But as an undergraduate mathematics major, my relationship with mathematics changed. I encountered academic spaces that made me question whether I could do mathematics and whether someone from my background belonged in the discipline at all. One professor made that question explicit when he told me, “Someone like you doesn’t belong in math.” When I spoke up, I felt as though no one listened. The message was loud and clear: perhaps higher education, and mathematics itself, had never been meant for someone like me. That is the version of higher education that I saw, still hold in my heart, and refuse to reproduce. I did not originally enter college intending to become an educator. After earning my mathematics degree, however, I entered the classroom through an alternative certification pathway and discovered something that has guided my career ever since: teaching mathematics, for me, was never solely about helping students understand derivatives, integrals, functions, or navigate algebra gymnastics. It was about creating a space where students could experience the beauty of mathematics, become immersed in its language and logic, leave better than they entered, and want to return—never questioning whether they belong. That belief is ultimately what has led me to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics education. My doctoral research interests grew, in part, from my own experience. I know what it is like to persist while wondering whether education has a place for you. I want to understand why students leave mathematics and higher education, why others remain, and what mathematics educators and institutions can do differently. More personally, I want to be the reason someone chooses to stay. But I also want to reach beyond the students who will one day sit in my classroom. I want to give a voice in academic literature to those who recognize themselves in this journey. Questioning one's competence, legitimacy, and belonging in mathematics can be deeply personal, but these experiences are not necessarily isolated. There are others who have persisted through while carrying many of the same questions I carried. Their experiences deserve to be studied, written about, and taken seriously because even those who stay can be changed by what they experience there. That is why pursuing higher education remains important to me. A Ph.D. is not simply another degree I want to earn. It is an opportunity to turn the experiences that once made me question my own place in mathematics into research, teaching, and mentorship that might make someone else's path different. I want to be the professor I needed and a scholar who makes visible the experiences of people who have wondered whether there was ever a place for them in mathematics and academia. In many ways, I am pursuing this degree so that someday, perhaps, fewer students will have to ask that question at all.

I love math because, somehow, after all these years, it can still surprise me. I have spent much of my life with and in the discipline of mathematics. I earned both a bachelor's and and master's degree in the subject, and am now a PhD candidate in Mathematics Education. I have the pleasure of teaching everything from high school algebra to undergraduate calculus and statistics. Math has become inseparable from who I am. But loving math has not always meant that that love was reciprocated. As a first-generation, low-income, college student from rural Appalachia, I entered undergraduate mathematics without knowing how to navigate higher education. Often, I questioned (and still do) whether someone like me belonged in mathematics and academia. I even had a math professor tell me, quite plainly, that I did not belong in mathematics, that I should drop the major in fact. I could have left. Instead, I stayed. This complicated relationship with mathematics is what I've come to love most about the discipline. Mathematics is so much more than an infinite set of problems waiting to be solved. Mathematics is a deeply human activity. We wonder, we struggle, we make mistakes, we argue. But more importantly, if we allow ourselves to engage with and not simply "in" mathematics, we'll soon see something that we could not before. Today, I get to share this with my own students—future mathematicians and mathematics educators. There are few things I love more than when I notice a students shift in questioning from "Is this correct?" to "What about this problem makes me think I'm wrong?" This represents something enormous: a student beginning to see mathematics as a language for understanding, not some calculations to endure or survive. My research is centered around the undergraduate math major, persistence in the discipline, and experiences that shape why students choose to stay or leave the field. In many ways, I am studying the questions I once had to answer for myself, "Do I belong here?" and "Am I good enough to do this?" Mathematics has given me a career, a research agenda, and a language for making sense of our world. But what I love most is that, through my teaching and research, I can help make math a place where fewer students ever have to ask whether they belong.

I’ll never forget the moment I stood in the back of a Kentucky high school auditorium, listening to one of my former students present her “Greenleaf Award” speech. This award is given to students in the top 20 of their graduating class, honoring someone who made the greatest impact on them during high school. Her name was Abby, and I had taught her during my very first year as a teacher at Knox Central High School, in southeastern Kentucky. She was a sophomore. She was brilliant (though she didn’t believe that), soft-spoken, and quietly carrying more weight than most adults I knew. When she stepped up to the podium, I expected something sweet, formal, something like I had heard before. But instead, she broke the audience. Instead of a speech clearly written with someone else’s support, she told everyone for this speech, she didn’t need a piece of paper or practice. She started to speak, commanding the audience’s attention. I was so proud to see her confidence. And then she said something I’ll never forget, I’ll never want to forget. I asked to have her words transcribed so that I never will. “Mr. Combs, you are the reason I stand here today as #2 in this class, and you don't even teach here anymore. Instead, you followed your dreams of leaving poverty behind, leaving bigotry behind, and I (and others in this class) are doing the exact same thing. Mr. Combs, this one is for you. Mr. Combs, whenever you hear Professor Stafford's words, remember me next. Remember I said this: ‘Mr. Combs is the joy I never knew I needed. He is the reason math made sense. Mr. Combs is the reason I’m graduating. Mr. Combs is the reason why I'm going to major in math. He deserves to know that I’m doing this, because of how powerfully gifted he is to the math community.’ I cried. For the first time in years, I cried. You see, Professor Stafford was the only math professor at my small undergraduate college who taught upper-level courses. He once looked me in the eye and told me that someone like me didn’t belong in the math community. I was a poor, first-generation student from rural Appalachia. I already felt like I didn’t belong. After that, I questioned everything. I questioned my intelligence, my path, and my worth. I didn’t go to medical school, though I had an MCAT score of 518. I didn’t believe I was capable of advanced degrees. I no longer believed I belonged in academic spaces. His words stuck to me like tar. But in that auditorium, Abby’s voice cut through years of shame, doubt, and disgust. She didn’t just speak to my impact. She gave me back a piece of myself I thought was gone. I left Kentucky after that first year to move with my partner to Chicago; to escape poverty, to escape bigotry, and to find room to grow. But students like Abby are why I have continued to stay in education. So are Rashad and Akin (from southside Chicago, IL), Elias (from Brookline, MA), and Shai (from Newton, MA). I stay for the kids who’ve lost their spark — not just in math, but in learning, in believing they matter. I teach because I remember what it felt like to be told I didn’t. I teach so they don’t have to carry that same wound. I didn’t become a teacher to fix kids. I became a teacher so students wouldn’t feel as broken as I did. I want Sierra Argumedo’s family to know I see my students the way she saw hers; as deeply human, full of worth, and worthy of being loved to their fullest potential. This is the kind of teacher I am. This is the kind of teacher I fight to be, every single day. And now, here I am, pursuing a PhD so that I can one day take up the same space Professor Stafford once held — but do it the right way. I want to stand in front of future mathematicians and remind them they belong. That they matter. That math is for them, too. Especially the students who were and are told it isn’t. But the truth is, I carry the weight of generational poverty with me every single day. I'm trying to break free, not just for myself, but for my students, for the communities I serve, and for my hometown. A place that, too often, says don’t even go to college, let alone get a PhD. I need others to know that they can do this too. To do that, I need help. I need financial support to continue this journey. This scholarship is not just honoring Sierra’s memory, and her legacy, but will lighten the weight on my shoulders so that I can continue to spread my own legacy. This scholarship can make it so that I can continue my work and exemplify Sierra's legacy through the work I promise to continue doing. I promise to keep loving students deeply, fiercely, and without condition. Thank you for your time and your consideration. Be safe, and be blessed, Jesse D. Combs