Rehan Staton, 24, Bowie Maryland
Rehan’s GoFundMe tuition page.
A Prince George’s Sanitation Worker, who’d collected money to fund his 4.0 GPA while attending Bowie State University, has recently been accepted into Harvard Law School! Rehan Staton of Bowie, Maryland had lived a humble life; “Life was pretty normal until I was eight years old,” Rehan said in a CNN interview. At 8 years-old, Rehan’s mother left the country, leaving the father to take care of him and his brother. At times working 3 jobs, the father funded private school for his sons. It was more than often that the bills were paid, but food nourishment fell short. Understandably, a humbling adolescence.
‘I wasn’t eating meals every day and my dad was working all the time,’ he told CNN.
The teenage Staton took the humility of his upbringing and used the strength of his desires in life to enter the realm of boxing; a championed sport of Marylanders. Nonetheless, if you grow up in Maryland as a boxer, you’re most likely going to be training against the bests of the nation. Unfortunately, the promising future Staton had was cut short due to a major shoulder injury from the ring; another humbling experience.
Rehan began working as a garbage collector at Bates Trucking & Trash Removal where you can have ex-convict-to-aspiring lawyers as coworkers. He told CNN, “It was the first time in my life people were lifting me up for the sake of lifting me up and not because I was good at sports.” In a favorable turn of fortune, Brent Bates, the son of the owner of the garbage trucking company introduced the ex-boxer to a Bowie State University professor. Impressed by Staton’s conversation, the BSU professor appealed the admissions board on his behalf.
“I became the president of organizations. I was winning so many scholastic accolades — it was crazy.” – CNN
Reflecting on being a sanitation worker, “I had to go to the ‘bottom’ of the social hierarchy — that’s to say formerly incarcerated sanitation workers — in order to be uplifted,” he told CNN. After two 4.0 grade point average years at Bowie State University, Rehan transferred to University of Maryland, continuing his GPA streak and graduated by 2018. In following 2019 year, while studying for the LSAT, Rehan worked in downtown DC for political consulting with the Robert Bobb Group, a firm in downtown DC. In that time he’d been accepted to law schools at Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, the University of Southern California, Pepperdine but has chosen to attend Harvard Law School this Fall!
“When I look back at my experiences, I like to think that I made the best of the worst situation.” – CNN.
24 Year-Old PG County Garbageman May Be Your Lawyer of Tomorrow was originally published on kysdc.com
