A teenage mom who gave birth to a baby girl at age 15 overcame negative views of teen moms to earn her PhD. Now, her daughter has graduated from the very program her mother created — 13 years to the day since her mother graduated from nursing school.
After welcoming her daughter, Dr. Dorothy Miller graduated high school and joined the military. She then earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing, then her masters degree, and finally her PhD. On May 7, her daughter Shaquita Bandy graduated from St. Andrews University, a nursing program that Miller created.
“It is interesting because we were at the car wash, washing the car, and her degree was laying in the trunk,” Bandy said. “So I opened it and I said, ‘Did you know that you graduated on May 7?’ And she was like, ‘Really?’ Then I opened mine and I was like, ‘We graduated on the same day!’”
Miller said she was in ninth grade when she became pregnant, and because she “came from a lower socioeconomic background” and lived in a rural area, there were limited resources available to her. She says it was her mother who helped her succeed.
“I had a wonderful mother when I was going through all that at 15,” Miller said. “Her goal for me was to not stop school. I had my child on a Friday, and my mother made sure I was in school that next Monday.”
Her father and high school guidance counselor both told Miller she would likely not have a promising career. But, she explained, “I’m just one of those stubborn kinds of people. I knew that I wanted to help people, growing up I wanted to either be a nurse or a police officer.”
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Her mother helped raise her daughter and when Miller joined the military, her mother took care of Bandy while Miller was away serving. After leaving the military, Miller worked two jobs and began nursing school to support Bandy and her other children.
“I got my associate degree, and then I got my bachelor’s degree and my master’s, and then I got my PhD, and then another master’s,” Miller laughed. “So I haven’t stopped going to school at any point.”
She is now the department chair of health sciences at St. Andrews, where in 2021 she launched the school nursing program — and her daughter was the first to graduate from it… because graduates were called up alphabetically.
“She gave me everything I needed to make sure I’m successful,” Bandy said of Miller. “You can imagine the pressure, though, coming through a program that was just established by your mother, being the first one to graduate, trying to make sure that you keep the program going … it’s tremendous pressure, but they say pressure makes diamonds.”
Miller said her top goals are to help alleviate the shortage of health workers in rural areas and for her children to do better than she did.
“Nobody should be able to tell you what your future is,” Miller said. “What some people saw as a mistake, having a child so young, to me was a catalyst. I think that if I hadn’t been given the opportunity to have that child, I wouldn’t have accomplished what I did. By having her, it pushed me to do something outside of me so that I could have a better future for her.”
