Dad proud of a daughter who will graduate to pursue her next goal: to be a nurse
I used to proclaim in jest that if my youngest daughter, Jenna, were born first, she would have been an only child. In jest, y’all. I said it in jest. I promise.
She was the third Huckaby child and most like her father in many ways, although I know she would never acknowledge or agree with that assessment. But she has always been the free spirit of the family and walked to the beat of a different drummer in many ways. Not all, but many.
Jenna, for example, when she was a senior in high school announced to her mother and me that she would not be attending college. She was going to Peru, instead, to be a missionary. She had found an organization that would let her do that for the paltry sum of only $15,000 per year.
There were two things in Jenna’s life that I put my foot down about. One: I wouldn’t let her quit taking piano lessons when she was a teenager. She has a gift from God in that area and I was determined she would develop that gift.
Secondly, she was going to college. And not just any college. She was going to the University of Georgia, hallowed be thy name. Remember that great scene from the movie “Blind Slide” when the player, Michael Oher, tells the NCAA investigative committee, “My family always goes to Ole Miss.”
It was like that.
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She showed me. She had me sign her UGA application, but didn’t send it in.
Luckily for me, Jenna and the world, I have friends in high places and the admissions office called on the last day that early admit applications were accepted and told me that they were not in possession of one from my third child. There are advantages to working at the school your children attend. I was able to walk down the hall to her class and find out about her application, which was hidden away in her locker.
I checked her out of school and she and I, with said application in tow, drove toward Athens and met an emissary from the admissions office halfway and her application was duly submitted on time. The next August, she matriculated, and it took her maybe five minutes to fall in love with college life.
She majored in Baptist Campus Ministry, and I will always offer prayerful thanks to Franklin Scott and Nathan Byrd for shepherding her through her time there. Jenna graduated with a degree from the Henry Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a certificate in Leadership from the Terry School.
She also made her mark in Athens and around the world by leading worship and working with youth in multiple area churches, assisting to feed the homeless and taking part in dozens of other missions and going on mission trips to Africa and the Caribbean and anywhere else she was needed.
After earning the college degree that she hadn’t intended to pursue, she married her classmate and BCM confrere and soulmate, Evan Simmons. Together, they established their own nonprofit missionary group and an uber successful wedding photography business, bought a home in a nice neighborhood and were adulting well.
Now, I told you all of that to tell you this.
A while back, Jenna decided that, although she was very good at her very lucrative profession, she was not exactly fulfilled and didn’t want to take pictures of brides and bridesmaids for the rest of the Saturdays in her life. Those are my words. Not hers.
Jenna decided that she would be more fulfilled and be able to help more people in a meaningful way if she became a nurse. Her mother, after all, has been in that field for more than four decades.
Nobody had to force her to apply, this time, to the school formerly known as the Medical College of Georgia — now Augusta University. She found her own program and her own funding and enrolled at Georgia State to take a few science prerequisites that weren’t required to graduate from Grady and the next thing we knew our Jenna was enrolled in a Master of Nursing program at the Athens chapter of that quite excellent school.
And Friday, the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, Jenna Huckaby Simmons — who is president of her class, said the proud Papa — will graduate. And she will go to work in the new year as a registered nurse in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta.
And her daddy could not be more proud. I love you, Danger Boo. You done good.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Father is proud his daughter went to UGA, and will now become a nurse
