Ceci Vaughn - Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship Semifinalist

DECATUR, Ga. – Ceci Vaughn, who is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, started her journey at Perimeter College during the fall semester of 2024. Currently a student on Perimeter’s Decatur Campus, Vaughn is a semifinalist for the 2026 Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship. This is her fourth attempt at higher education, and, as she puts it, “the very first where I had the support I needed to truly shine.”

When asked what it would mean to her if she won the Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship, she replied that it would “mean access to opportunities, support, infrastructure and systems that have been denied to me my entire life. I go a little bit speechless thinking about the beauty of how much Jack Kent Cooke could help me and our communities build together something that’s lasting, something that helps everybody have that access.”

During her time at Perimeter, Vaughn has been a Perimeter Ambassador, on the President’s List two times and the Dean’s List once. She’s in the Honors College, won first place for Outstanding Essay in Social Sciences at the Georgia Collegiate Honors Conference and she was named Student of the Semester for her Intro to Neuroscience section in 2025. She’s a member of Phi Theta Kappa and was acting president of Feminati, a Perimeter student organization, last semester.

What has been the best aspect of attending Perimeter College?
Perimeter brought me back to myself in ways I truly never thought would be possible post-IPV (Intimate Partner Violence). I found my voice, my calling and my people here. The relationships I’ve formed here will continue to shape the rest of my life and the positive impact Conduit, my nonprofit, will have on the communities we serve.

What’s next for you?
I was admitted to NYU School of Professional Studies with multiple scholarships. I am still waiting to hear back from some other institutions, but if chosen as a Cooke Scholar, I will be able to actually afford life in the city - and perhaps even attend my 18-year-old self’s absolute dream school!

What are your career goals?
I am a community organizer, and my peers here at Perimeter inspired me to build a nonprofit, Conduit, which channels resources, knowledge and power back into the hands of the people. Since we began operations last September, we have grown to an organization of 15 - and every single one of us is a Georgia State University student and all but one are Perimeter students. I plan to continue leading Conduit as founder and executive director, and I also plan to continue speaking at conferences and writing and presenting original work as a scholar-organizer. I hope to pass the reins of Conduit to one of our co-founding directors after five or six years. Movement work should never be egotistical or stagnant, and I can’t wait to see how else I can get involved in community care wherever I’m lucky enough to land next.

What motivates you to keep moving forward with your academic and career journey?
This is a journey of healing for me, and I work hard for every version of myself who refused to give up along the way. Beyond that, though, I returned to school to gain the tools, skills, knowledge, network, and resources to further my community organizing reach and impact. Knowing how much it matters that I take my education seriously as an act of harm reduction and healing pushes me through even the hardest moments.

What experiences shaped who you are today and where you want to go with your career?
I surprised myself by embarking on this academic adventure. After my third (and declaratively final) attempt at higher education 18 years ago, I never planned to find myself scrambling to enroll in time for fall semester again. Divorce, especially the kind that follows nearly a decade and a half of intimate partner violence, can turn one’s world upside down in the most astounding ways. Truthfully, I’m still struggling to pull together the foundational structures for my life today, but I learned early in this journey of re-discovery and reclamation to keep building, brick by brick, even when a blueprint is nowhere to be found. Had I not, I might never have known I had been building a path all along - nor would I have had the chance to experience the beauty, connectivity, heart and community that awaited me once I stepped timidly upon it.

I reentered academia with the goals of growing my network, knowledge, skillset, social awareness and fluency and meaningful, intentional impact within the movement. Community organizer training taught me to fill the gaps, find the needs, meet them where they are and refrain from unintentional resource taking by avoiding overlap with organizations that already exist and are actively doing the work. I am outspoken about my work and passions, and by last semester, other students began asking me how to get involved. Conduit was born from this need, channeling resources, knowledge and power back into the hands of the people. Our impact is already measurable on campus and in the community. I had never planned to combine my fourth attempt at higher education with my organizing work, but the two have joined forces in unbelievable ways, each pushing the other farther along.

Perimeter College has been home to an impressive number of recipients of the national Jack Kent Cooke (JKC) Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship. Since 2002, 30 Perimeter students have received the competitive award from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which offers each winner up to $55,000 per year for up to three years. It’s the country’s largest private scholarship for two-year and community college transfer students. Perimeter JKC winners have succeeded in bachelor’s degree programs (and beyond) at Georgia State University and other prominent institutions such as Yale, Georgia Tech, MIT, Emory University, Howard University, University of Southern California, Stanford University and Agnes Scott College.