Cedric Foster’s passion for helping young people in the Mississippi Delta is self-evident.
The 27-year-old, who grew up in Swiftown and Itta Bena, was one of them not too long ago. He overcame the same obstacles they face — a single-parent household, a lack of confidence, poverty — to get a master’s degree. He now works as a software engineer in Alabama and is married with a daughter.
“Coming from here, people almost expect you to fail. They don’t expect you to do pretty much anything with your life, and I wanted to prove people wrong,” Foster said.
He achieved success in part through having a plan of action. He’s turned that strategy into a guide for college students, “Building a Strong Foundation: A Guide for Being a Successful College Student No Matter Who You Are or Where You Come From.”
Foster is trying to build connections with universities to provide the book to freshmen. He’s starting in Mississippi and would like to expand it to the rest of the country.
The spark for the book was a talk he gave to students at his alma mater, Leflore County High School, in 2010 at his mother-in-law’s behest.
“The poverty level here is quite extensive. A lot of kids don’t know what to do or where to go, and they read the book, I give it to them,” he said.
Foster said the No. 1 thing he wants students to do is think about their futures first and then go about building a foundation. The book gives bulleted plans for each year of college and internship and job tips. He said he teaches readers that no one owes them anything.
That was a lesson Foster had to learn for himself.
“There was a point in my life where I was on the road to being a loser, if you will,” he said. “Always thinking people owed me something.”
It led to a rocky relationship with his mother, which caused him to move out and live with his aunt, then sister, then aunt again. When he was about 16, Foster called his mother and asked for her to buy him clothes, figuring she could at least do that because he wasn’t living with her.
She dressed him down, saying that she didn’t owe him anything and that he would be a man soon and needed to make things happen himself.
“It changed my life that moment, and the next day I got a job. And from there I was independent,” he said.
Foster graduated in 2003 from Leflore County High School and went to Mississippi Valley State University. He said in the book that he wasn’t the best student in high school and had just a 17 overall on the ACT and 14 on math.
He said he struggled during his first semester of college, feeling like his peers knew a lot more than him.
“I then made a vow that each of my teachers would know me for my hard work and character. From that day on I dedicated my life to succeeding in school and becoming the best that I could be,” Foster wrote.
He graduated from Valley in 2007 with a 3.9 GPA and interned with NASA. He later got a job with Raytheon Missile Systems doing rocket science.
Foster then received a master’s degree in software engineering from Arizona State. He’s now working on a high-fidelity security system.
For information about Foster, visit his website at fostersdream.com.
• Contact Charlie Smith at 581-7235 or csmith@gwcommonwealth.com.
