Scholar Alumna: Shakira Ray

Sowing Confidence to Reap Possibilities

As a middle schooler at Hill-Freedman World Academy, an international baccalaureate school, Shakira Ray was on the path to a promising future. Her path widened irrevocably when she joined Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia in 2014.

“The program was very instrumental to my academic success,” said Shakira. The depth and breadth of the curriculum, as well as the range of experiences shared with a diverse group of peers and teachers helped her confidence flourish. 

“I was maturing socially…meeting people [Teaching Fellows] who were older than me and being able to conduct conversations with adults, and in front of my classmates through presentations,” she said.

Shakira felt motivated to raise her hand without fear of giving “the wrong answer” because the class often held discussions about why one answer may be better than the other. “Even though we were just middle schoolers, there was a big emphasis on self-expression,” she said. 

She recalled a social studies lesson on the U.S. Constitution as being “on a very high level,” which inspired her choices when she started at Central High School. “That encouraged me to join the debate team at Central, because of all the exposure from Breakthrough,” she said. “You need these types of extracurriculars so that you can think of the big picture.” 

Shakira attended Breakthrough for a few years, and her blossoming continued: She became an orientation leader by her second year, and started writing for the school newspaper, The Centralizer. By her senior year, she was its editor-in-chief. 

Always seeking growth opportunities, Shakira enrolled in the college preparatory program offered by Minds Matter during her last two years at Central, joining summer programs to explore a career as a journalist. She earned a degree in journalism from Ithaca College.

The ability to visualize a professional future and pursue her dreams were seeded and nurtured at Breakthrough, she said. “[The program] creates a mindset and an environment to thrive and to think about where you want to be five, ten years later, conversations that you don't have in most Philadelphia public middle schools,” she said.

With her degree in hand, Shakira remained clear-eyed about the rapidly changing landscape in journalism. At the behest of a relative, she joined financial services firm Vanguard, got her licenses to offer investment advice and now, five years later, she is nourishing her call for telling stories as part of the analytics team.

“I wanted to work with data because with numbers you can still tell stories, which is an aspect of the business that I like,” she said. “I may not be client-facing at work in my current role, but analyzing data and providing recommendations and analytics and insights makes my journalism degree worth it, because I like that storytelling portion of my job.”

Just as she was not afraid of extra homework at Breakthrough, Shakira remains motivated to take on the extra challenge. As she put it, “Breakthrough just inspires and helps kids reach their full potential academically and socially.”

Contributed by Mara Lemos-Stein