Meet Jordyn G.

Early Childhood graduate

Hudson Valley Community College Early Childhood graduate Jordyn Goldhaber has known she wanted to work with kids since she was one herself.

“I just love working with kids and seeing them grow and develop. I’ve always loved that. My mom is a kindergarten teacher and I knew since I was in second grade that I wanted to be a teacher too,” says Jordyn, who is now 26. “I actually attended the BOCES program when I was in high school for Early Childhood Education, and I graduated high school with my CDA certificate.”

Despite her preparation during high school, her family’s support, and her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher, several bumps in the road have threatened to put a stop to Jordyn’s college journey over the past seven years. But she has demonstrated that she has the perseverance to get past any setback—and she’s proud to know that when she crosses the stage at commencement this spring, she’ll have proven to herself and to everyone else that she can, in fact, succeed.

After she graduated from a large high school on Long Island in 2017, Jordyn packed her bags and moved to Cobleskill to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Studies. “Initially, I went to Cobleskill right out of high school. I thought I was ready to be away from home and for that experience, but I wasn’t. I didn’t do very well there,” she explains.

So in 2019, Jordyn returned home to Long Island. Determined to keep her education on track despite leaving Cobleskill, she enrolled at Suffolk County Community College—but in her second semester there, the pandemic hit. With her plans derailed again, but her dreams still intact, she decided to take a break from school and focus on finding work instead—but was stymied by the difficulty of finding early childhood education jobs without a degree. Though the odds seemed stacked against her, she refused to give up. And after a few years, she was ready to give college another try.

“Two years ago, I looked at my parents and said, ‘I really want to go back to school,’” Jordyn recalls. “I found out about the CareerNext program, which gives students with disabilities a little bit of extra support, and a community.” Originally, Jordyn wanted to return to Cobleskill, which offers a CareerNext program as well. She reapplied, and was accepted into the school, but there wasn’t room in the program for her. It seemed like yet another roadblock - but then, she found Hudson Valley.

“The director at Cobleskill said Hudson Valley had a CareerNext program and if I went there first, I’d automatically get into CareerNext at Cobleskill when I came back,” she recalls. “At first, I said no, absolutely not—I didn’t want to go to another community college, because the experience I had at the first one was not great.” But her parents convinced her to take a tour of Hudson Valley, and by the end of it, she just knew: this was where she wanted to be.

With a new game plan in place, Jordyn took one more leap of faith and enrolled at a new college for the third time. But this time was different. She moved into the College Suites, got involved with CareerNext, and got to work on her Early Childhood associate degree. She found community through fellow students, academic support programs like CareerNext, and her professors, especially her academic advisor, Education and Social Sciences Instructor Diane Teutschman, who she credits with helping her get through some of her most stressful and challenging moments at Hudson Valley without getting too overwhelmed to continue.

“This school has been amazing for me. Even the student teaching experiences I’ve had-- I’ve never seen a community college offer student teaching. I’ve been very lucky to work with all the grades I’ve worked with,” Jordyn says today. She began student teaching during her first semester at Hudson Valley, first in the Viking Childcare Center on campus, then at an early childhood education center, then at a kindergarten, and finally at a preschool. The experience has only reinforced Jordyn’s knowledge that this is the career path that was meant for her; and Teutschman says that her student teaching performance has been “stellar.”

Today, as she gets ready to graduate from Hudson Valley, Jordyn is thriving. She is a member of Phi Theta Kappa, the official honor society for two-year colleges, as well as Kappa Delta Pi, the education major honorary society. During her time at the college, she served as co-president of the Early Childhood Club, and also received a Leadership in Education Award from her department this year. She is graduating with a GPA of nearly 4.0. And she is ready to return to Cobleskill this fall as a junior and finish her bachelor’s degree.

“My plan as of right now is to graduate with my bachelor’s and then go into the field for a year, and if I’m really not happy with preschool, then I’ll go back to school and I’ll get my masters to teach elementary school,” she says. “It’s ironic that I’m going back to Cobleskill, but it’s really nice to know I have another opportunity to prove to myself that I can succeed.”