ATLANTA — She’s driven a dump truck for the DOT. She’s styled hair in three states. She’s helped visitors navigate Mercedes-Benz Stadium on game days. But this month Kyra Harper (B.I.S. ’24) started a new chapter dedicated to helping others achieve their college dreams — just like she did.
Harper graduates this month from Georgia State’s College of Education and Human Development with a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Learning and Development. Her focus while in school has been on deaf studies and counseling.
Exactly two weeks before walking in her college’s Dec. 19 graduation ceremony, Harper began a new position in the Student Learning Center on the campus of Georgia State University’s Perimeter College Newton Campus. She’s helping students in the same position she was in when she first came to Perimeter in 1995.
Harper grew up in Phoenix, Ariz., and moved to Georgia in the early 1990s with her mother. She enrolled in what was then DeKalb College in 1995, after brief stint in Iowa, but gave up after struggling with the college’s math requirements. What she didn’t know then but later came to understand is that she had an undiagnosed learning disability. She had to work harder than others did.
“I was so used to just coping,” Harper said. “But I knew something was stopping me.”
Having already worked as a stylist in Arizona, she obtained a cosmetology and barber’s license in Georgia and began work, but the work wasn’t satisfying.
She did temporary jobs to make ends meet and even got on with the Georgia Department of Transportation, where she moved through various positions driving dump trucks and front-end loaders, helping on crews painting over graffiti and sealing cracks in the pavement on Interstate 20.
In 2006, she won the DOT’s District Seven Employee Achievement Award and after passing a series of exams was promoted to permit technician in the district’s Utilities Department.
“Working at the DOT strengthened my character,” Harper said. “It helped me with discipline and helped me stay focused on my goal and where I wanted to be.”
That place was back in school.
With the encouragement of her mother, Harper enrolled in 2014 in Point University and later landed a job there in the enrollment office after earning an associate degree and starting work on a bachelor’s. But when Point, which had already moved its main campus to West Point, Ga., wound down operations in its historic home base of East Point, Ga., Harper lost her school and her job.
After transitioning back into the beauty industry again and getting laid off amid the pandemic, Harper decided to take another run at completing her bachelor’s degree — this time focusing on American Sign Language, which she’d started to study and put to practice while working a part-time job at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
At Mercedes-Benz, Harper says she bought into the culture and made sure everyone she had the privilege to serve never experienced exclusion. Using her American Sign Language skills, she became the only two-time Arthur Blank Hero of Hospitality winner out of more than 600 employees.
“My heart goes toward advocacy,” Harper said. “Interpreting was my goal when I went back to school, but once I got into the program at Georgia State, I learned there’s more I can do.”
In 2021, Harper enrolled in Georgia State’s College of Education and Human Development intent on finishing a degree. She also knew that, because she’d been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), she’d need additional resources to get to the finish line.
Having engaged with Point’s accommodations office during her associate degree studies, once Harper got to Georgia State, she headed for the Margaret A. Staton Access and Accommodations Center.
In the center she found allies and advocates who could help her with adaptive technologies, a distraction-free testing environment and other tools and strategies to give her an equal shot at succeeding in the classroom. She was even able to land a work-study position with the center where she used her abilities in American Sign Language to assist members of the Deaf community.
At the start of her senior year, though, her life took another turn when she became a full-time caregiver to her mother. She wondered if she’d be able to handle the pressure of a full courseload under the weight of the added responsibility.
“Thanks to Access and Accommodation, TRiO Student Support Services, the GSU Counseling Center and my faith, I am graduating today,” she said. “I realized I had a support team that was going to make sure I saw graduation, and I’ve not stopped.”