Oklahoma student chooses unlikely route to honors

April Marciszewski

LANGSTON, Okla. — The valedictorian from the magnet high school did not go to college.

“I was just worn out,” Leethaniel Brumfield III said.

He had spent four years “trying to be better than everybody else” at Classen School of Advanced Studies in Oklahoma City. Then he turned down a full scholarship to historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and filmmaker Spike Lee attended.

His parents did not understand, and in their household, children who did not move on to college moved out.

Brumfield found a $700-a-month apartment and got a job as a collections manager for Sprint in Oklahoma City. Soon, he figured out he could not get a promotion or more money without a college degree.

And he felt inferior to his high-achieving peers from high school. He would run into them at Wal-Mart, and he felt stupid, having worked so hard just to end up in a dead-end job, he said. His friends had “out-of-this-world” stories from college to tell, and Brumfield could only talk about work.

So at 23, he enrolled at Langston University, the closest historically black college. An adviser told him to apply for scholarships, and they started pouring in. Now a junior, he has so many scholarships, he is actually making money by going to college.

Brumfield did not pick an easy route through college. He is double-majoring in biology and chemistry and plans to graduate in four years, by May 2008, when he will be 27. He has to make at least a 3.5 grade point average to keep his scholarships. Somehow, he managed to fit the presidencies of various campus groups into his schedule.

That is, until he had a stress-induced stroke last semester.

On Oct. 6, he woke up with the right half of his body paralyzed. He remained paralyzed through November but began to regain movement in December. The prognosis was good: He should be back to normal within a year. Now, only the right side of his face remains slightly stiff.

Brumfield stuck with his classes after the stroke and ended the semester with a 4.0 grade point average.

He let his campus activities slide, and he is taking only four classes this semester. His genetics class is hard, but “microbiology is a piece of cake,” he said.

A few weeks ago, Brumfield got a call at about 10:30 p.m. while he was doing homework. He did not recognize the number, so he let it go to voicemail. He listened to the message and found out he had won the United Negro College Fund/Merck Undergraduate Science Research Scholarship Award, which will pay up to $25,000 for his school expenses next year and pay at least $10,000 for two summer internships.

“I couldn’t sleep that night,” he said.

This summer and next, the United Negro College Fund/Merck program is sending him to Harvard University to research the development of medicine. When he won that internship, he turned down four others — at Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt University and the University of Arizona.

Langston University President JoAnn Haysbert said, “The mere fact that you have students at Langston who get offers at MIT and turn them down for more favorable offers — that bodes well for the institution.”

Brumfield hopes the internships will allow him to get into graduate school at Harvard.

“If I could just do that, I would be so happy,” he said.

Eventually, he would like to teach chemistry or biology at a historically black college.

For now, as he continues to go through physical therapy, he said, “I’m really thankful and try not to be so stressed.”

He is not likely to slow down too much, however, considering his philosophy is to put his all into whatever he does.

Recently he flew to Arizona to present his research on a shellfish toxin at a conference. A couple of hours before his speech, he squeezed in some study time for his final exam in genetics.

(The Tulsa, Okla., World)