His father murdered his mother when he was two years old. He then spent the rest of his childhood in more than 40 foster care homes in New York where he was told he had a learning disability, that he did not have the intellectual capacity to obtain a college degree and that he was seriously emotionally disturbed.

“I was walking around as a youngster angry at the world,” says Jackson, adding that his father was the source of his rage.

At the age of 18, when he had to leave the foster care system, he had a decision to make: either he’d prove folks right, or wrong. He decided on the latter; forgave his father, enrolled in community college and poured those raging waters of anger into a well of motivation.

“I have been hungry to obtain knowledge,” he says. “I have worked all my life to prove folks wrong.”

And, he has.

Jackson, 32, is now a doctoral candidate in global leadership with a specialization in educational leadership at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla.

Jackson “decided early on that he was going to be one of those kids who would overcome the obstacles and not allow his past to define his destiny,” says Dr. Jill Levenson, a professor and human resources department chair at Lynn University. “He recognized that he could make choices that would facilitate a path to success and he was able to do that.”

Jackson’s dissertation, which he hopes to defend in April, is titled: “Predicting the Educational Achievements of Young Adults who Were Formerly Placed in Foster Care.” The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among demographic attributes, types of child maltreatment, risk factors (including the number of foster care placements and youth criminal activity) and protective factors (including placement stability) with the foster care alumni adults’ academic achievements, Jackson says.