UNLV graduate earns doctorate despite brain injury

She went to the doctor. In the doctor’s office, the pain got worse. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital.

Meningitis? Swine flu? They checked for everything they could think of.

It was a stroke caused by a blood clot in her brain, what’s called an ischemic stroke.

Erin Russell had had a stroke. She was 31 years old.

She was newly married and in the middle of working toward her doctorate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. That was 2009.

“When I actually had the stroke, the world just started kind of spinning around,” said Russell, director of legislative affairs with the law firm Kaempfer Crowell.

Russell, now 33, graduated from UNLV on Saturday with a Ph.D. in public affairs.

“I was able to overcome the obstacles,” she said.

And she is proud of that.

“A Ph.D. is hard enough in itself,” she said, “but to be able to do this with the obstacles I had in the middle of it, I feel like I really accomplished something.”

Russell was one of almost 10,000 college students in Nevada getting a new degree or certificate this month, spread around the state’s seven colleges and universities.

The College of Southern Nevada, whose ceremonies are set for May 23, will award almost 2,500 degrees and certificates, while about 250 graduated from Nevada State College on May 7.

UNLV, which had graduation ceremonies Saturday, awarded almost 3,000 degrees, the most of any institution in the state. Of those, 2,000 were bachelor’s degrees, while the rest were advanced degrees from the main university or the dental and law schools.

“This has been a challenging year in the history of our university,” said UNLV President Neal Smatresk. “While facing budget cuts of an unprecedented magnitude, we’ve remained steadfast in our commitment to provide a quality education to our students.”

Russell, who lives and works in Carson City during legislative sessions but in Las Vegas the rest of the time, loves helping create policy as a lobbyist. Her dissertation focused on how much work legislatures such as Nevada’s do during the time between sessions.

She hopes to pursue that further now that she’s earned her degree.

“It was an area that really hadn’t been focused on,” she said.

After the stroke in 2009, she wasn’t sure what she’d be able to accomplish in school. It affected parts of her brain that control balance and some cognitive skills. Reading was really hard afterward.

She took baby steps, she said, in her recovery. She took a leave from work for several months.

But she never gave up on school.

Shipra De never had time to give up on school.

She was one of six students honored at Saturday’s UNLV graduation as an outstanding graduate.

Peter Starkweather, dean of UNLV’s Honors College, said De is a rare student.

He said a prestigious scholarship application he filled out about her last year was the strongest one he’s ever done. She got the scholarship, too.

“She’s that good,” Starkweather said. “That intellectually versatile. And she’s really that serious about her work.”

Starkweather nominated De as one of UNLV’s outstanding graduates.

Why?

She is 23 years old. She is getting three degrees, and they aren’t in basket weaving. She’s a triple major: math, economics and computer science.

She once got an A-minus in a differential equations class, and suffered the indignity of a B-plus in something called real analysis.

Everything else was an A. She’s used to that. She was valedictorian at Green Valley High School.

Even though she was accepted to Stanford University, she said, she chose UNLV partly because her sister went there and excelled — the sister is working on her doctorate at UCLA right now — and partly because she wanted to be home with her parents.

But why three majors? It didn’t start out that way. She was just majoring in math. She had to take a computer science class along the way, and she liked it. She took an economics class, and she liked that too.

Next thing you know?

“A few classes turns into a minor,” she said. “And then you have all the classes you need for that, and you still want to have more classes, so that turns into a major.”

She said she’ll go on to graduate school, but she isn’t sure yet what she’ll study.

“I really need to make a decision,” she said. “I can’t get three Ph.D.’s.”

She said she is going to take a year off and work at an engineering firm, where she’s been an intern the last two summers.

“I haven’t figured my life out yet,” she said.

She’s got time.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.