Defending your doctoral dissertation while pregnant is a real boss move. But defending your doctoral dissertation hours after giving birth? That is the ultimate boss move. New Jersey mom Tamiah Brevard-Rodriguez is that boss. Mere hours after the mom of two gave birth to her second child (in the front seat of her car no less), she defended her doctoral dissertation from her hospital bed — and she passed.
On March 24, Brevard-Rodriguez was putting the finishing touches on her dissertation, “The Beauty Performances of Black College Women: A Narrative Inquiry Study Exploring the Realities of Race, Respectability, and Beauty Standards on a Historically White Campus,” while she was eight months pregnant. She had already sent out the Zoom link to her family and friends and was ready to go. But life had other plans.
A month and a day before her due date, on March 25 at 2:15 a.m., she went into labor. Her wife tried to get her to the hospital as quickly as she could, but their son, Enzo, was born in the front seat of their car at 5:55 a.m., after three pushes. Despite being a month early, little Enzo was perfectly healthy. The car, on the other hand, was a different story.
“I did have to detail her car afterward,” Brevard-Rodriguez explained to NJ.com.
“I had more than enough time to regroup, shower, eat, and proceed with the dissertation,” Brevard-Rodriguez explained. She even had time for a nap before her 1 p.m. appointment. The doctors and nurses at the hospital even made sure she had a good WiFi signal and everything.
She defended her dissertation on Zoom using a Rutgers background, and after she found out she passed, she dropped the background, revealing Enzo in her wife’s arms. “I said, ‘You guys missed the big news,’ and they just fell out,” she said, explaining she didn’t want sympathy from the dissertation committee.
“Tamiah had delivered a flawless defense with zero indication that she had just given birth,” Melina Mangin, chair of the Educational Theory, Policy & Administration department at the Graduate School of Education,” told the outlet. “She really took the idea of productivity to the next level!”
Finishing her dissertation and giving birth were two gifts Brevard-Rodriguez gave to herself for her 40th birthday.
