From Harvard to . . . Harvard

Every year Extension School alumni pursue advanced studies at Harvard graduate schools. Writers Suzanne Spreadbury and Melissa Hale Woodman introduce two such graduates, Deborah Daccord and Kamilla Elliot.

Deborah Daccord

Deborah Daccord, AA ’90, ALB ’92, JD ’95, was a talented high school student at age 17, looking forward to her senior year. Her days were filled with typical teenage events: researching colleges, hanging out with friends, and occasionally babysitting the youngest of her three siblings, ages 16, 15, and 5. Then the unimaginable happened. Her father died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and two months later her mother died in the hospital due to an overdose of medication, a case of malpractice. “Overnight I acquired three children, two car payments, and a mortgage,” she says.

Understandably, most teenagers would have retreated from the overwhelming responsibility, but Daccord and her siblings were concerned with keeping the family intact. They fought relatives and neighbors who wanted to split them up. “My siblings and I had just lost our father and our mother; all we had left was each other.” Thus, Daccord adjusted her high school schedule and went to work full time as a waitress, hostess, bookkeeper, and later as a paralegal to earn a weekly salary. When she was old enough, she sold the family home in Acton, Massachusetts, and bought a more affordable condominium in Brookline. Every day for the next 11 years, she put food on the table and provided emotional support to her siblings. She watched over them as they finished secondary school and went off to college, all the while taking one or two courses at the Harvard Extension School each semester. “The affordable tuition and evening schedule made it possible for me to add school to an already demanding schedule,” she says. “Perhaps there were other options, but none them offered the quality of instruction and diversity of courses.”

For years, Daccord endured a grueling schedule, working 50 to 60 hours per week and parenting her siblings and, later, two of her own. Even though she was physically exhausted and emotionally drained, her mind was hungry for learning—so much so that despite all of her adult responsibilities she managed to excel at the Extension School, earning a place in the top 5 percent of degree candidates. “I didn’t want to just earn a degree,” she says, “I wanted to learn about the world around me and be intellectually challenged.”

Daccord also excelled at her job as a paralegal, and her success helped her decide that becoming a lawyer would be her next challenge. The qualities that she exhibited throughout those trying years—leadership, confidence, and an ability to problem–solve—were clear signs to the admissions committee at Harvard Law School that Daccord possessed the characteristics of an effective lawyer. In addition, an impressive list of academic accomplishments provided evidence that she could handle the academic work: a 3.76 cumulative GPA, acceptance to the Dean’s List, the class marshal prize for graduating with the fourth–highest GPA, and the National University of Continuing Education, Region 1, Outstanding Continuing Education Student Award.

Daccord also credits the Harvard Extension School. “I would not have been admitted [to law school] if I had chosen another evening program. As a Harvard Extension School graduate, you’re telling the admissions office that you’ve already had the experience of juggling several obligations while completing your education successfully and you’re not willing to sacrifice a quality education for convenience. Moreover, I was so well trained; my writing, research, and time–management skills were second to none.”

After Harvard Law School, where she won the Irving Oberman Memorial Award for best essay on a contemporary legal topic, Daccord went to work for the Boston–based law firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo P.C., where she is now a partner. She practices in the health, and business and finance sections in the Boston office. Because of the circumstances of her mother’s death, she has a particular passion for healthcare law. Daccord has spoken and published on post–acute–care mergers and acquisitions, incentive compensation arrangements, and other topics. She is also active in the firm’s Domestic Violence Project; volunteers as a law teacher with Citizen Schools, an apprenticeship program for Boston middle school students; and is involved in various community development projects.

“I want to thank the Harvard Extension School for providing me the opportunity to continue my education against all the odds,” she says, “and for offering the highest quality education to those of us on nontraditional life paths.” —SS

Kamilla Elliott

Kamilla Elliott, ALM ’91, PhD ’96, is quick to acknowledge the role of serendipity in her current career as lecturer in English literature at Lancaster University in England.

Elliott grew up in England. Her life changed drastically when her mother died just as she was to attend university. In 1976, at the age of 18, Elliot and her family moved to the United States. In America, she earned a BA in mass communications at the University of Colorado, Boulder. But it wouldn’t be until eight years later that she’d decide to return to school to study one of her original passions, English literature.

Within the context of her upbringing in a strict Scottish household, Elliott’s path was not always so assured. “I was raised in a very religious household where women did not have careers and where mothers did not work unless finances mandated it,” she says. Indeed, after a year of postgraduate film studies at Boston University, she seemed destined to fulfill her family tradition as she left to devote herself full time to raising her newborn son. Nearly a decade later, with two children, she began to work part time at a public–health research firm to supplement the family income. It was returning to work that inspired Elliott to consider her career interests more broadly.

Exploring those interests meant revisiting her original passion for English literature. While toying with the idea of graduate school, she received a letter out of the blue from an old professor with whom she had lost contact. Her professor told her that the field was opening up and that she thought Elliott would make a good English professor. “The first part (the field opening up) turned out to be false,” Elliott says with trademark honesty. “But the second part, I hope, turned out to be true.”

After deciding that she wanted to pursue a PhD, she found the Extension School, where she initially planned to take some courses in preparation. But she soon realized she needed to pursue a master’s degree to move forward.

She received her Master of Liberal Arts (ALM) from the Extension School in 1991. In another five years she completed her PhD at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, with a thesis concentration in the films of Victorian prose fiction.

“I had a wonderful time doing my ALM—great teachers and colleagues,” she says. “Everyone there seemed to want to study and was excited about studying. . . . Later, when I became a teaching assistant [at the Extension School] while pursuing my PhD in the ‘day’ school, I found the same commitment and passion for studying among the students I taught.”

Although encouraged to apply to the Harvard PhD program by Sue Weaver Schopf, one of her professors at the Extension School, Elliott, with seemingly typical modesty, was unsure of her chances of acceptance. When she got into Harvard and two other local universities, there was no doubt that Harvard clearly offered the best resources on every front—faculty, library, courses, funding, and teaching opportunities—in addition to being a place that valued “creative and independent thinking.”

Reflecting on her time at Harvard, Elliott recalls a story about one of her professors, Seamus Heaney, that illustrates the nature of the relationships she built with faculty. “I remember the week my letters of recommendation were due for the job market,” she says. “Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and newspapers reported that no one knew where he was. With little hope that my reminder regarding the due date would reach him, I popped it into a packet the university was mailing out to him. This was just after the OJ Simpson trial, and my young son had recorded a message on our answering machine, ‘Leave a message and your opinion on the OJ verdict after the beep.’ A few days later, the phone rang at 3 am. When I got up, there was a message: ‘This is the office of Seamus Heaney. We’ve no opinion on the OJ verdict, but we want Kamilla to know her letter’s in the mail.’ In the midst of celebrity and media flurry, Seamus Heaney had taken the time to think of a former student.”

Most of all, Elliott expresses her gratitude that “Harvard let me develop my gifts and interests, providing invaluable guidance but not seeking to change or indoctrinate or clone me.”

Today her children are themselves firmly ensconced in university life, and she is enjoying being back in England, a place she has always considered home. She says that after eight years of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, she has now rekindled her love for her work in the space of a few months. “All in all,” she concludes, “I count myself most fortunate to have been through the Harvard Extension School ALM Program and the day school’s PhD program. It was quite a package.”
—MHW