"You're Part of the Family"

When she came to CCV, Debbie Stevens-Tuttle was a single mom with two preschool children. She’d been out of school for 22 years, and had no college experience — but she was determined. She told her academic advisor, “I know I can do this.”

As soon as she started her CCV classes, good things began to happen. “Every single class opened up a whole new world,” Debbie recalls, “and my teachers took a genuine interest in me. They told me, ‘You can do whatever you want.’”

Debbie worked hard; she held half a dozen part-time jobs during her time at CCV. “I didn’t sleep much! But it was wonderful.” When she took an anthropology course with Rebecca Werner, CCV’s associate academic dean, “that was it for me,” Debbie says. “Anthropology is what drew me, and it still draws me.”

Debbie graduated in 1998 with a 4.0 grade-point average. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Vermont, with highest honors and two special-achievement awards. Today she works with UVM anthropologist Deborah Blum on research and other projects, and she’s a full-time research specialist at the UVM Department of Neurology. The job involves a range of duties — “all of which CCV trained me very well for,” she says.

“CCV is like a family. These people care about you. Between the advising and the support that I had and the quality of the instruction, I was in heaven! And they don’t forget you, either.”