Reprinted from EKU Stories

Ten years after she dropped out of high school, Kelli Jo Blair was standing at her kitchen sink, washing dishes from the breakfast she had made for her family. Her three children were playing and fighting in the living room. Country music played in the background.

And then a single song forever changed her life.

“Is there life out there?” Reba McEntire asked in her hit song of that title.

Like the character McEntire portrayed in song, Blair loved her family and motherhood. “But was there more for me? Was I always just going to be ‘someone’s mother’ or ‘someone’s wife?”

Then and there, she determined her answer.

“I knew in my heart and soul that I was made for more,” Blair said. “This was not all that I am. I wanted my own identity and to achieve my own goals as well.”

Her first step on her most improbable journey was obtaining a GED, because she was a high school dropout. One of her most recent steps was to the podium at an Eastern Kentucky University commencement ceremony, where the summa cum laude graduate shared her amazing life story as student speaker for EKU’s College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Rewind to Sheldon Clark High School in Inez, where as a teenager, Blair “got lost, really lost. On any given day, my teachers could not find me. I had a 1.5 GPA, was truant, and had better things to do than attend school. Or so my arrogant teenage mind thought.”

So, it’s no surprise that her journey through college as an E-Campus psychology major was one of overcoming self-doubt and fear – “fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of not being good enough (or) too old, even fear of public speaking.”

Her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a