At irregular intervals in time, the world is visited with awe-inspiring wonders and rarities, like the fact that Dorothy Jean Tillman was actually called a “doctor” at age 17.
While most pubescents are preoccupied with the prom, upcoming high school commencement, and maturation into adulthood, Tillman was onstage at Arizona State University in suburban Phoenix. She defended her dissertation and earned her doctoral degree in integrated behavioral health.
The irony is stunning. She has mastered the pinnacle of American education and is now officially called Dr. Dorothy Jean Tillman — but she doesn’t even qualify to vote yet.
“It’s a wonderful celebration, and we hope that Dorothy Jean inspires more students,” Associate Professor Leslie Manson told WGN9. “But this is still something so rare and unique.”
Tillman’s mother, Jimalita Tillman, told CNN that seeing her daughter achieve so much at such a young age is humbling.
“She had to sacrifice a lot…of her fears and going through different things during the pandemic,” she said. “She emerged as a leader without fear, showing them how to navigate online schooling.”
Homeschooling enabled Dorothy Jean Tillman to operate at an accelerated pace
The wunderkind displayed scholastic prowess from an early age growing up in Chicago. By the time she was just 7, she was already handling the high school curriculum while being home-schooled. At age 10, she was enrolled in college courses.
In an interview with CNN, Tillman revealed she had obtained her undergraduate and master’s degrees by age 14. But she was hardly finished, even though her mother thought she had enough education.
One day, the daughter turned to her mother and said, “I think I want to pursue a doctorate degree.”
“I was just like, ‘Why? I thought you were done,’” her incredulous mother asked.
When Tillman explained to her mother her aspirations to devote her career to positively impacting young people’s mental health, Jimalita lent her full support to her daughter.
Dorothy Jean Tillman’s accomplishments did not come without sacrifices
Tillman walked across the stage at ASU’s College of Health Solutions on May 8, and her mother was gripped by the magnitude of the accomplishment at her age.
“I knew what it took for her to go through that,” she said.
For Tillman, who recently turned 18, accomplishing the educational ultimate at this point in her life enables her to metaphorically exhale while contemplating her next steps in life.
“It was always a very hard thing to kind of stomach mentally being so young. When you get out of college, you’re thinking, ‘What do I do next?’ Now I am able to sit in the comfortability of being a teenager and being OK with the fact that I don’t have to figure out what comes next,” she told CNN.
