By Maura Sullivan Hill
Dr. Tanya Rand D’20 did homework for her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the kitchen table, usually alongside her three children. By the time she was working on her Doctor of Education Degree in Leadership at Saint Mary’s, her grandchildren were around for the study nights.
“They’d be saying, ‘Nana, Nana, what are you doing?’ Well, I’m writing my paper,” recalls Rand, who worked as a clinical social worker for 13 years and now teaches in the School of Social Work at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul. “My children learned the value of education through me, seeing Mom go back to school.”
Her path to higher education was a nontraditional one. Rand had her first child at 17 and did not finish high school. Instead, she earned a GED in her early 20s. When she returned to school for both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work, it wasn’t easy.
“I always had a feeling of imposter syndrome. I am a first-generation college student. I was a teen mom, and I dropped out of high school, so college was a journey of not thinking I belonged, from way back in the first classes that I ever took,” Rand says. “This whole concept of education can be mine, too, and I’m smart enough and I have enough capacity, came at Saint Mary’s. In every class, I sat in a room with professors who made us feel valued and that as long as I worked hard, I could do it. Saint Mary’s is high accountability but high support.”
During her years of clinical practice, Rand provided social work services to patients and families diagnosed with movement or cognitive behavioral disorder, including support groups for those with traumatic brain injuries, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia.
Rand created an internship program for master of social work students at the hospital where she worked, and it was through mentoring and teaching those students that she realized she wanted to transition to teaching full time. At Saint Mary’s, she found a doctoral program that “caters to working people with busy lives and busy families,” she says.
“I could not have continued to work full time, which I did throughout my entire doctoral program, and raise three children without Saint Mary’s,” Rand continues. “I had a supportive family, a supportive employer, and I had Saint Mary’s.”
Rand says that the doctoral program prepared her for the leadership roles she has now taken on at the University of St. Thomas, where she runs the program for students studying aging services and is also the project coordinator for a $1.9 million grant that the School of Social Work received from the federal government.
“My learning was very rich, being in a classroom at Saint Mary’s with people from diverse backgrounds, from race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status, as well as being surrounded by incredible diversity of thought and careers and backgrounds,” she says. “There I was, a social worker, sitting next to people who were in the criminal justice world or health care or K-12 education and higher education.”
Rand attributes her success to a combination of resilience and stubbornness, plus a strong faith and a “glass half full” approach to life. While working toward her degree, she encountered some personal health challenges and her husband underwent an unexpected open-heart surgery; she also took time to care for her aging parents and stepparents.
“Throughout it all, never did I feel that my professors and advisers were going to give up on me. It was, ‘We’re here, we got you.’ Every time I felt down on my journey, that gave me hope and encouragement,” Rand says. “I chose to attend Saint Mary’s University for many reasons, but what I kept coming back to over and over again is the gratitude I have that I was always made to feel that I genuinely belonged.”