North Carolina A&T State University professor Dr. Sharon Waldrum has always been a support system for her students and she will continue to do so.
“I always tell my students, ‘I am in your life as long as you need me to be’,” she said.
Whether advising in person or on Facebook, Waldrum aims to be a resource for each of her students.
“My home is Connecticut. I remember coming here and not having a connection with administrators or professors and I dropped out and I knew that was part of the reason,” she said. “Then when I came back, I decided I was going to be that resource for my students.”
In her time at N.C. A&T, Waldrum has become more than a resource. During her first class meeting with new graduate students in the adult education program, she explains that she answers to two names – Dr. Waldrum and Mom.
“We establish this relationship – this rapport. I talk to them like I talk to my children,” Waldrum said.
When one of her students, Janice Jacobs got ill, Waldrum sprang into action. The relationship between the two women began on the first night of class and Jacobs began calling her mom. Their conversations would also start out professionally but always, somehow, end on a personal note.
Shortly before her December 2011 graduation, Jacobs learned she had cancer, which has since metastasized in her lungs. She couldn’t bear to tell Waldrum but another student did. Jacobs didn’t accept her phone calls so she left her messages.
“When another student told me I immediately called only to get her voice mail,” Waldrum said. “I left the message, ‘Why did I have to find out from someone else that you are sick?’.”
Since then, Waldrum has been calling and texting regularly to check up on Jacobs.
“I can’t help with her pain, I can do very little to help with her finances. I can drive her somewhere or I can go sit with her but a lot of times, people don’t want that,” Waldrum said.
Wanting to show her support for her student, and later a friend who suffered from pancreatic cancer, she started thinking about what she could do.
Jacobs had already started chemotherapy treatments. One of the side effects of chemo is the loss of hair.
“One of the people in my cohort when I got my Ph.D. does an event in Raleigh every year in support of cancer patients for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation,” Waldrum said.
“I thought to myself well, ‘you’re not going to go through this so often’.”
Like most women, Waldrum has gone through a bevy of hairstyles including weaves and her hair has thinned with age.
“I thought, ‘What’s the worst that could happen? It’s just hair, it normally grows quickly’,” she said.
So, Waldrum shaved her head. For a number of years, she has been knitting, and wearing, kufis – brimless caps. When she went to visit Jacobs, she took with her a dozen kufis so that she wouldn’t have to tie up her head or wear baseball caps. The kufis allowed Jacobs to be “fashionable.”
“When I saw her, I took off my hat and I told her, ‘Now you don’t have to go through this alone’,” Waldrum said.
“For me to do something small like this to lighten their spirit, it’s a very small price that I’m paying to help somebody else when they’re going through some things.”
This is not the first time Waldrum has paid what she considers to be a small price to help her students. She’s helped homeless students, fed some students and their children. She believes it’s all a part of a higher plan.
“God placed me here for a reason,” she said.
“I’m of that era that the person who’s going through the most, those of us going through the least should do all we can.”
