Lisa Koycar Wouldn’t Let Her Circumstances Stop Her

Earning a Master’s Degree in nursing is hard–but Lisa Koykar’s childhood gave her no choice but to toughen up. The nursing masters’ student at Marquette University recently penned a post for LinkedIn about her youth, which garnered more than 22,000 comments.

“I was in eleven different foster homes,” Koykar wrote, “Here I am after all the tears. I’m set to graduate in less than 3 weeks.”

Koykar entered the foster care system when she was eight years old, after being removed from her biological parents’ home because of neglect. She says the love and encouragement she received from her final foster family was the push she needed to pursue an education. However, others weren’t so helpful–especially the judge who saw Koykar when she aged out of the foster care system at age eighteen.

“When I was 18 and being emancipated from the foster care system, I was told by a judge that within a year he would see me back in his courtroom in handcuffs. It was that statement that made me realize three things: 1.) Foster children have to continuously prove themselves to everyone, they have to prove that they’re not “bad seeds” or a menace to society. 2.) We are continuously judged, sadly by the actions of our parents, never given the opportunity to shine on our own accord. 3.) No matter what, I wasn’t going to let that statement steal my ability to become my own, to achieve whatever goal I established for myself,” Koykar wrote.

Koykar is now 37 and graduating at the end of May.

“18 years later, I’m less than 50 days from graduating with my Master’s in Nursing, given the honor to join Sigma Theta Tau, an international nursing honor society, all the while being a mother to three beautiful daughters and a wife to an amazing man who serves our country,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “Moral of this story, never judge others by their cover. Never categorize others based on their past.”