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Student Profile: Kalilah Shelton
Perserverance pays
By Rita Wold
rwold@mscd.edu

It will take more than negative perceptions to kill the spirit in one of Metro’s own.

“I think people take up the stereotypes about black people and black woman and they assume they know who I am,” Metro political science major Kalilah Shelton said. “I like to prove people wrong.”

Shelton, 23, recalled being a curious child who was more concerned with what was happening somewhere besides her own backyard.

“We would be in a store and we would skip an aisle, and I would go back and go down that isle just to see what was there,” Shelton said.

Born in Long Island, N.Y., Shelton is the third of four children. At age 8 she jumped at the chance to move with her great aunt to Denver.

“I’m a very impulsive kind of person,” Shelton said. “I have always been the one to say let’s do it, let’s see what it is all about.”

In high school she participated in a number of plays including Fiddler on the Roof and Marcus is Walking. Also a lover of literature, Shelton said she likes to read books that motivate her to be a better person.

As a freshman at Colorado Christian University, Shelton was discouraged from going into medical school – a dream she had since she was a kid – by a professor who told her to change her major because she would never become a doctor.

“That hurt me. I was still just 17 at the time,” Shelton said. “It doesn’t matter what people say you can do, what they think you can do. It matters what you know you can do.”

According to Shelton, her first political science class was at CCD and she loved it. Since then she has participated in the Model Arab League and the Model United Nations. She is also a member of the Political Science Association. These experiences have made her want to become a human rights commissioner or an ambassador to a foreign country.

Although she believes there are some genuinely good people in politics, Shelton doesn’t want to be a politician.

"Once you get to a point in politics I think you lose the people aspect of it,” she said.

Shelton disagrees with the way television negatively depicts assertive black women, adding that if a black woman voices her opinion, it is treated as a bad thing. She thinks all girls should look up to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice because of what Rice has accomplished.

“She is doing something that someone told her she could not do,” Shelton said. “At one point someone said ‘maybe you should choose something different.’”

Graduating from Metro in the fall, Shelton said she loves the school and all it has offered her.

“I think we are lucky to have the professors we have,” she said.

After graduation Shelton plans on traveling and still aspires to enter the medical field.

“There are so many dreams that I have, and I want to fulfill as many of them as possible,” she said.