NEWPORT, Tenn.—After being awarded a significant scholarship, a senior student from Cocke County High School will be attending one of the top universities in the country, beginning this fall.
17-year-old Destiny Jenkins has been awarded the Questbridge National College Match Scholarship for the University of Chicago, where she will major in Global Studies, minoring in Human Rights.
Questbridge is a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, California. Since 1994, the organization has connected exceptional, low-income high school students with top colleges.
Through the scholarship, and through recognition of her discipline and hard work, Jenkins will be joining the same prestigious school that has turned out 94 Nobel laureates, including Milton Friedman, Charles Huggins, and Albert A. Michelson, who measured the speed of light in 1907, becoming the first American to win the Nobel Prize.
It is a school that turns out historical figures nearly as consistently as the diploma itself. Former President Barack Obama was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years, until becoming president in 2008.
Getting into the University of Chicago is difficult, as the school is among the most selective in the nation.
In order to be considered for acceptance, a prospective student must show a 4.48 grade point average. Even still, the acceptance rate for students wishing to attend is just 7.3% of all applicants. For reference, Harvard is 5% and Duke University accepts 7.6% of prospects.
Getting accepted to a top-tier university seems to have been easy for Jenkins. Teachers say she had already done all the hard work in school, where she is currently taking three dual enrollment courses and spends less time each day at the high school than spent working on college-level material. The more difficult task, as is often the case, was coming up with more than $300,000 to pay for it.
“I had looked at University of Chicago before, just because of their human rights program,” Jenkins said, “but I was like, ‘I just don’t think I can go there. It’s like $80,000 a year. No way!’ But then I applied for [Questbridge] and I was a finalist.”
Being a Questbridge finalist did not mean she had secured the scholarship, however, and she expressed some doubts to her older cousin, Brandy Strom, who has played the support role of a caring adult in Jenkins’ life. Strom said Jenkins told her she was worried she would not make the second cut. Out of more than 6,000 applicants, Jenkins was one in 145 matched to the University of Chicago.
“When she first got into the program, she was like, ‘I can’t do it, I’m not going to make it,’” Strom said. “I was like, ‘Girl, you are going to make it.’ It feels so good to see her come so far.”
Jenkins said she believes it was the attitude in her essays that got her a match to the University of Chicago. Instead of focusing on the negative aspects of the conditions for needing a scholarship, Jenkins wrote about the positive things she learned, and how she grew as a person from difficult experiences. In the essays she expressed gratitude to the family who let her down, as well as the family who picked her up with her brother, without a second thought.
“I feel like a lot of people when they’re writing their college essays, they’re like, ‘Feel bad for me!’” Jenkins said. “I wrote about my mom and my dad, and all that, and I wrote about like, human rights, why I want to do that, but I like, focused on the positive aspects, instead of all the negatives so I feel like they liked that.”
She is accustomed to helping people through her love of writing, by looking over friends’ material or helping her brother construct his own essays.
Jenkins explained in an essay for Questbridge that since she wants to help people, she was first drawn to medicine. However, she later explained that she found her purpose after taking a government class she liked in school. At the same time, she said the events in the summer of 2020 and rise of the Black Lives Matter movement for equality and police accountability got her interested in civil rights.
She made that point in her essay where she stated that she wants to “help those who can’t help themselves, those who have been wronged for simply having a different skin tone, having a different religion, or even for loving someone of the same gender.”
Jenkins said she would like see change in the healthcare system and immigration system, but she sees herself becoming an attorney, working to improve the justice system.
Jenkins is an understanding friend, said Kaylee Large, a freshman at East Tennessee State University.
“I’m going to miss her so much,” Large said of her best friend. “I go to her for everything.”
Large said she and Jenkins have common experiences, and she had never met someone who understood everything she has been through.
“I think she deserves it more than anyone else I’ve ever met,” Large said. “If anyone’s going to change the world, it’s her. I feel like this scholarship just really helps her get to that point.”
Jenkins said one day she was in class discussing crime and race, when a student raised a common misinterpretation of crime statistics as his reason for avoiding East Knoxville.
“He’s my friend now. I set him straight,” Jenkins said, laughing out loud. “But he was like, ‘Well, on the news, you know, it is mostly Black people who are the criminals.’”
Jenkins disagreed with the premise. She said in many cases Black communities within cities don’t receive the same resources as other groups because of the color of their skin, which leads to systemic failures that produce crime, inevitably forcing them into the news, and people do not care to challenge that as a representation of the entire group.
“First of all, you don’t see a lot of Black people shooting up schools, shooting up banks, shooting up churches,” Jenkins said. “Second of all, most of these Black people live in poor communities and they don’t have the resources or support to do better things, so their first go-to when they need money – but they don’t have job opportunities because people don’t—they won’t hire Black people, you know? Then they have the high schools in the cities they were raised in. They don’t get the education that some white people or even other Black people might have – and then so their first go-to is, ‘Oh, I’m going to deal drugs because it’s easy money. Easy way – they have people teach them how to do it. Then they get busted, and then they’re in jail, so then what? If they have kids, and their kids—their father’s in jail, so they don’t have anyone to raise them, and then the cycle just keeps going, going, and going, all because they didn’t have the support that other people might have. So I was like no, it’s not only Black people.”
She said she got through to him.
“He was like, ‘You’re right, you’re right.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I am right.’”
Jenkins, whose mother is white and her father is Black, wrote in her essay that she has encountered racism directed toward her. During her interview, she said because of her complexion she does not experience as much, but said her friends face discrimination, and her brother has, too.
“I have a twin brother, but we look nothing alike,” she said. “Even like, 7th grade, you know, he was getting called the N-word. My little cousins in 7th grade don’t even know what that means. They just never really heard it around. We don’t say that at the house, so—and they’re white.”
Jenkins has already visited the school in Chicago, and said she likes it. She said she is happy that she will soon be able to work and learn in a more open, accepting environment.
“I feel like people don’t care to be who they are there. It’s very different,” she said, smiling. “A lot more culture there. A lot more diversity. It’s huge. It’s like Hogwarts.”
Jenkins herself does not feel pressure to be anything other than who she is, but observes that others living in the region face pressure to fit a certain mold.
“I’m pretty average,” she said, “but maybe for someone else, who’s a little more – I don’t know – not what people here see as normal, they might not feel very open to being who they are.”
She said racist and homophobic slurs are still commonly used among students in the halls at school, and that even some teachers convey racist attitudes.
“I feel racism is a big thing in Tennessee, anyways, but yeah there’s obviously people who go to school who, you can just tell, sometimes. And then some teachers, too, they act different toward students.”
She told the story of a fellow student who was excited about starting a career with Dollywood’s Splash Country after the company sent representatives to a job fair at the high school. She said his enthusiasm was met with a racial “joke” from one teacher.
“It was one of my friend’s brothers, actually. He’s Black,” she said. “He was like, ‘Well, I’m going to work at Splash Country,’ and they were like, ‘What do you mean you’re going to work there? You can’t swim,’ all because – you know, he’s Black – which is very, very out of place. You know, like he saw it as a joke, but then people—I feel like a lot of people here don’t realize what they’re saying can even be racist, or sound as bad as they think it does.”
Jenkins is on good terms with her teachers. Katie Banks has been Jenkins’ math instructor for two years at Cocke County High School, and she says Jenkins’ hard work and perseverance are paying off, but that she has remained a humble student.
“I just think it’s absolutely amazing, especially since I’ve recently read some articles about that college, and it’s very, very difficult for anyone to get in there, more or less somebody from out of state,” Banks said. “She did a wonderful job.”
Jenkins thanks her family for supporting her and making her who she is today. Although she was not mentioned in this article, in addition to the other sources she named her maternal grandmother Nanay, Angie Jenkins, as being instrumental in her success. They live together in Sevierville.
Jenkins is in a group chat with other recipients of the scholarship who are going to her school. They are sharing experiences and coordinating a possible meet-up upon arrival in September. Jenkins will graduate from the University of Chicago in 2026. She plans to attend law school.
This story appeared in The Newport Plain Talk.