'I Never Expected Anything Good to Happen to Me'

It was too much for Andrea Soto to believe.

The thought of a scholarship had always seemed so far-fetched, no matter how much encouragement she got from her mother and from her teachers at Watkins Mill.

Yet there the letter was, waiting when she got home from orchestra practice last week. She opened it, started reading. She couldn’t get past the first two lines. Congratulations, it said; the University of Maryland-College Park had picked her for the Banneker/Key Scholarship. Four years of tuition and expenses were taken care of.

She stopped reading. She stopped breathing. Her mind raced over everything she had gone through to get to that point: the grueling junior year where she proved her mettle; the pressure of needing to land a scholarship; the immensity of being the first in her family to go to college; the isolation she felt growing up American but with immigrant parents; her parents’ divorce; her autistic brother; her penchant for self-doubt.

“There’s always doubts that I won’t do well, that things won’t turn out,” she said. “I never expected anything good to happen to me.”

She read the letter a second time, and it finally sank in: Help had arrived. Those pressures lifted, joy took their place. She couldn’t help but cry.

College had been something she took for granted as a freshman and sophomore, an A’s and B’s student who just didn’t give it much thought. Heading into her junior year, she realized that wasn’t good enough, so she signed up for five Advanced Placement classes—after taking only one the year before.

“I had no idea what the workload would be," she said. "It was a shock. It really was awful in the beginning. I had no idea how to handle it.”

She turned to her teachers after school, during STEP and Village Time. Academics took all her focus and attention. She settled in, found her bearings and finished the year with straight A’s.

The struggles at home hadn’t eased, of trying to manage her school life while helping take care of her 16-year-old brother, whose autism is severe enough that their mother stays with him at home. Increasingly, she was facing more of his bad days than good, more mood swings, more tantrums.

Yet he also became her compass.

“When I start getting frustrated with schoolwork, I try to remember that,” Andrea said. “He’s always in the back of my mind. I always think it’s made me more caring.”

It was in the midst of that arduous junior year that her life’s disparate pieces suddenly came together. Science had long been her keenest interest, and she imagined herself a doctor someday. But when her biology class reached its lesson on types and techniques of research, she found a moment of clarity: making it her life's work to find the causes and cures of autism.

“I’ve always known I wanted to help people like my brother, and it just clicked,” she said. “I want to do something great, but I don’t have such extraordinary talents where I’ll just join a band or be a soccer player. I need an achievement that will identify me. That’s one thing that always drives me.”

After being the cause of so much struggle, she now has her brother to thank. Her grades and SAT’s were good, but not stellar enough on their own to win the scholarship. It was her essay and interview that she thinks won the school over, where she explained the role her brother has played in who she is, and how he inspired her to a life researching Autism.

“They saw how passionate I am about my dreams and goals,” she said.

It pains her that she can’t share with him the good news of the scholarship; he doesn’t understand those kinds of things. But she’s comforted that, wherever the scholarship leads, her brother and mother will be right alongside.

“I always tell them, ‘I’m taking you everywhere I go.’”