Dexter Knight-Richard, Future Educator and Scholarship Winner

The Oldest of Seven

In the third grade, Dexter Knight-Richard and his friend started a book publishing company. They would write down each copy by hand and pass it out to anyone who would take it.

Now a junior at Connecticut College majoring in English with a minor in Education, Knight-Richard writes about American Reconstruction literature, and plans to become an educator who teaches English literature. With the support of the Taco Bell Live Más Scholarship and the no-essay Mahoney Family Foundation Scholarship, he will graduate nearly debt-free.

Although Knight-Richard’s publishing enterprise was short-lived, the experience sparked an interest in sharing his writing with others.

However, as a student at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion School in Hadley, Massachusetts, his opportunities to write assignments in English were limited to English class. At first, he struggled with his immersive school’s Mandarin classroom instruction.

“English class was like an escape…it was something familiar, where I could be a lot more creative,” he said.

Knight-Richard’s English teachers encouraged him to show his work to his peers and his family — which includes a twin, a middle brother, a second set of twins, a stepbrother, and a stepsister. Not all his siblings enjoy reading. But Dexter persisted.

“I like learning, and I like reading, and I like writing, and I really wouldn’t have if there wasn’t that support network,” he said. He wanted to provide a similar experience to others by becoming an educator and mirroring his teachers’ actions: “I wanted to try to fill those shoes.”

His post-graduation destination was clear: college in New England. The itinerary was not.

Knight-Richard was 17 and working his first job when he first started to think about how his family would afford college with seven children in tow. But it wasn’t until senior year of high school that he realized how deeply the question cut.

“Thankfully those resources were presented to me early on; otherwise I don’t know how keen I would have been to just [look up] scholarships and pray that I found a worthwhile resource.”

At a college financing workshop hosted by his school, he learned about scholarship search platforms, including Scholarships.com — and about student loans, including the distinction between subsidized and non-subsidized federal loans.

While “they wouldn’t really say explicitly, ‘a lot of you might be paying more than your parents earn in a year per semester,’” Knight-Richard quickly realized that he would have to take out loans.

Understanding that scholarships were the key to limiting debt, his first course of action as soon as he got home was to sign up for a free scholarship search account and apply for all the no-essay scholarships for which he was eligible. He then applied for other eligible scholarships using Scholarships.com.

“Thankfully those resources were presented to me early on; otherwise I don’t know how keen I would have been to just [look up] scholarships and pray that I found a worthwhile resource.”

No-essay scholarships were just the beginning. That fall, Knight-Richard approached the scholarship application process systematically, creating a “master document” with paragraphs he could reuse in essays for the 30 or 40 applications he sent out.

He had to wait half a year before seeing any payoff.

Knight-Richard approached the scholarship application process systematically, creating a “master document” with paragraphs which he could reuse in essays for the 30 or 40 applications he sent out.

In the last two weeks of high school, during finals period — months after finding out that he would be attending Connecticut College the following fall —, Knight-Richard finished a final exam early.

He checked his email and saw that there was a new message about the Taco Bell Live Más scholarship. He opened it: he’d won.

“I had to go to the bathroom because I was so jittery, and I yelled in there,” Knight-Richard said. The Live Más scholarship is renewable throughout college and provides students with a mentorship program and support during their studies.

“It was more money than I had ever seen at one time in a thing that had any correlation to me…I thought it was wrong,” Knight-Richard said. He double-checked the email to make sure he wasn’t being phished. He even logged into the scholarship portal for reassurance. It was “very exciting and very surreal.”

It was real. As was the next scholarship he won, the Mahoney Family Foundation Scholarship.

Thanks to these opportunities, “the math really worked out,” and Knight-Richards was able to combine scholarship funds with income from working on-campus jobs to cover miscellaneous educational expenses. The support enabled him to avoid taking out private loans.

Now “the goal of graduating mostly debt-free doesn’t feel even remotely as unachievable as it did before.”

That freedom has enabled Knight-Richards to dig into an academic subject he is passionate about: American Reconstruction literature.

After a period of self-discovery (he now knows that Renaissance drama isn’t for him), he found he had much to say in response to the writings of Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles Chesnutt.

Typically, he said, people think that “there was slavery, then there was racism, and then we’re good now…but there was a good, almost a century in between those that we just don't talk about.” He plans to write an honors thesis on the post-Civil War period in American literature, and to improve his skills as a literary analyst and critic.

Dexter's advice to other students who find themselves applying for scholarships is perhaps surprising. Don’t be afraid to write bad ones and apply for as many as possible.

“It’s gonna feel like extra homework, and it’s gonna suck, but treat it as a second job, especially if you need it as bad as I did. Just do it for three months. You will be so thankful that you tried it.”