Just a few years ago, single mother Eddie Marie Toines-Nobles didn’t have the encouragement or self-esteem to pursue big changes in her life.

That was before financial aid from TCU gave her a chance to follow her dreams.
She’d grown up in a family of nine children near Paschal High School in Fort Worth, almost in the shadow of TCU. But TCU might as well have been hundreds of miles away. It was costly. It was prestigious. It was something friends and family told her was not possible.

Even though Toines-Nobles was the first in her family to graduate from high school, college didn’t seem like an option so she worked at the post office, got married and had five children. Finally, in her late 30s, she began working as a home health nurse, following a long desire to be a nurse. She started nursing courses at Tarrant Community College but kept applying to TCU and stopping in at the financial aid office almost every two weeks.

In 2004, Toines-Nobles found out she had been accepted at TCU.

“I was so happy,” she says. “My daughter said I was acting like I got into Harvard. For me, it was just as good.”

It’s not always been easy. With four of her five children still at home, Toines-Nobles managed to complete clinical internships at six hospitals and hold down a job as a student-worker at Harris Methodist Hospital’s surgical unit and at JPS Health Network’s oncology unit.

In December she received her bachelor of science in nursing, and though she has $55,000 in student-loan debt, her spirit is soaring with pride.

Now the 42-year-old nurse is the first in her family to earn a college degree.

“A while back I could only see myself sitting around the house. After starting at TCU I thought I could see the backyard. Now the fence is down and I can see the whole world,” she says.

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