From Homeless to Nickelodeon; ESU Student Bridges His Own Wealth Gap Through Education

It could make for the plot of a pretty compelling movie: a young homeless man finds his way to a university and starts taking classes. Within two years he is interning at Nickelodeon and later being recruited by Fortune 500 companies.

East Stroudsburg University student Jerome Dixon is just the person to tell that story because he’s lived it.

“When I started at ESU, I was homeless,” Dixon says.

Dixon was living in the woods from April to September 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. He was doing odd jobs and eating meals out of a can. A friend’s family sheltered him periodically and suggested he apply at ESU.

Fortunately, before he even began classes, Dixon was connected with Dr. Bailey Higgins, case manager for ESU’s Health and Wellness Center under the Dean of Student Life. She helped him get a voucher for housing and provided other assistance.

“We work with students to get them access to the resources they need in order to help them be successful,” said Higgins, citing the Campus Advocacy and Resource Engagement or CARE Program. CARE works with undergraduate and graduate students on a broad range of needs including food, housing, clothing, and other necessities, as well as making connections to both on-campus and community resources. The CARE Program provides holistic support to students to help them meet their personal and academic goals.”

Early on, Higgins’ work with Dixon focused on helping him secure necessities such as shelter, food and transportation as he faced one hurdle after another.

“Life has thrown him many obstacles,” she said. “When you overcome big challenges, you do it in baby steps. So maybe you solve your housing and have somewhere to live but then that opens up more obstacles like ‘how do I pay my rent? How do I pay my internet bill? How do I have access to food?’ ”

“I think the complexity of what he was experiencing would knock his feet out from under him,” Higgins said. But Dixon has shown the grit and resilience to face those challenges and find a path forward to focus on academics and career goals.

“Maybe he’ll get pushed and he’ll stumble but he doesn’t fall,” she says.

Now a sophomore, Dixon loves the storytelling and creativity involved in his major, digital media technologies, and has leveraged those passions in his internships.

To date, Dixon has spent 18 months — with breaks — interning for Paramount or its subsidiaries, including Nickelodeon. This fall, he took ESU classes online while sharing an apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y. and interviewing for paid positions at companies including Wildbrain, home to such shows as Teletubbies and Inspector Gadget.

Recently he interviewed for a paid position with a recruiter from News Corp., which owns Dow Jones and other companies.

“They own so many brands, so you start with a recruiter,” Dixon said. “They start passing you to different teams and they say ‘OK, who’s going to employ this person?’ ”

Dixon spent his early childhood in the South Side of Chicago but moved to Florida during middle school to live with an aunt he calls “mom” who raised him. Some of his best memories are of the two of them bargain hunting for DVDs in pawn shops and curling up at home together to watch them. His favorites included everything by director Martin Scorsese, the film “Taken” and the HBO series “The Sopranos.”

The classes he has taken remotely this semester have helped him understand his own life and how to make the most of his future. He’s learned in sociology class about the extreme wealth gap between the richest one percent of Americans and the middle class and poor – statistics that hit home to him.

“The distribution of opportunity is not equal,” Dixon says. “This wealth gap has been something I’ve realized has been so true in my own life. Where I am from it’s like an incubator of stress.”

When he first moved to New York City for an internship, he was living at a Bowery Mission homeless shelter and had to be out of the shelter each morning by 5:30 a.m. So, he would head to Nickelodeon to take a shower and be ready when the managers started coming in.

Currently, he is sharing an apartment with two roommates, but Dixon sees earning his ESU degree as a stepping stone to a less precarious existence.

“For me, it’s always been a battle for stability,” he says. “Education really is the key to future mobility.”

He’s taking a psychology class that has him thinking about how to make the most of the cards he was dealt in life, and how to play to his strengths.

“You have to kind of control what’s in your wheelhouse,” Dixon said, adding that a course in personal finance has been “life changing.”

ESU financial aid, the CARE program and having Dr. Higgins in his corner have been vital to helping him move closer toward his goals, he says.

“What I would want more than anything is financial stability,” he said. “I want to be able to build up a savings account. I want to do things I didn’t know I loved.”

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