Gabriella Colello

The future Ph.D. who once thought she was incapable of getting a college degree

By Toyloy Brown III

Gabriella Collelo sobbed in her white Volkswagen in a University of Connecticut parking garage in December 2018. She just dropped out of college after three semesters.

She was a commuter student at UConn’s Hartford campus and needed to be close to home to assist her mom who learned she was going to have an 18-hour brain surgery during Garbiella’s freshman year. The anxiety that sprouted from this discovery along with other traumas contributed to Gabriella’s mental and emotional well-being deteriorating.

She partied excessively to numb her heartache and worked full-time as a line cook in a Wallingford restaurant to relieve some of the financial strain in her household.

Gabriella left UConn with a 1.8 GPA

The tears that rolled down her cheeks that day in December embodied her hopelessness.

“I didn't think I was capable of getting a college degree,” Gabriella said. “I was so terrified of what I was going to do with my life. I had student loan debt, and I had no idea what to do. I just remember feeling so disappointed in myself and like I was worthless or that I was stupid, and that I had let everybody down.”

Gabriella enrolled in Naugatuck Valley Community College in June 2019 after leaving UConn, and her goal was to get an associate’s degree, so she could become a paralegal. She still expected the worst to happen.

“I'm going to fail again, there's no way,” Gabriella thought.

She was wrong.

“I finished summer semester with all A's, and I remember being fucking terrified that I was going to drop the ball or disappoint myself again. But then I didn’t and I just kept doing really, really good.”

In August 2019, she graduated with a 3.7 GPA and an associate of science in paralegal studies. Gabriella planned to find a job immediately.

Yet, she didn’t because of Kathy Taylor, a professor at her community college.

“She is the only reason I'm in college today,” Gabriella said. “She sat me down, and she was like, ‘you're not joining the workforce, you're going to finish your bachelor's degree.’ So she helped me fill out my college application, she even paid for some of them. She was this huge support in my life.”

Taylor is Gabriella’s mentor and the first Black attorney she met. She encouraged Gabriella to continue her education because she knew there was a bright future ahead of the recent graduate.

“I immediately just saw how intelligent Gabriella was, how inquisitive she was,” Taylor said. “She just exemplified what we say about lifelong learning. I can see … the potential and see her ability to add her unique voice to scholarship.”

After community college, Gabriella enrolled at Quinnipiac in August 2020. She’s a senior political science major with a 4.0 GPA and is the president of the Indigenous Student Union.

She initially believed she wanted to specialize in American politics, but decolonization piqued her interest more. Her desire to be educated in this sector also coincided with her Pacific Islander background.

Her mom is African American and Tahitian, which is French Polynesia, and her dad is Italian. While Gabriella grew up in a household where she practiced her Pacific Island culture, she never engaged in Oceanic history in school. She lived in a predominately white neighborhood where she felt ostracized because of her background and appearance.

When she enrolled in a new school for 6th grade, classmates called her "Mexican Gabby." In high school, people described her as "exotic" since she is biracial and has a Pacific Island background. Many assumed the latter meant she was Hawaiian.

Gabriella is an avid dancer, which unfortunately for her, is another way people have showcased their shallowness.

She’s danced Hula and Ori Tahiti professionally since she was 12, making appearances from birthday parties to BravoTV. But as Gabriella matured, she realized that the way she views her culture’s dances is different from how others perceived it.

“I remember showing up (to dance) and people thinking that I was a sex worker … or just men making lewd comments at me,” Gabriella said. “Something that I saw (as) cultural and sacred, and something that I wanted to share had turned into something commodified and sexualized.”

Whether perceiving her culture’s dancing as crude or making blatant assumptions that all Pacific Islanders are Hawaiian, the ignorance of too many has driven Gabriella toward trying to fix that problem through education.

At Quinnipiac, she made a mock syllabus for the potential implementation of a Pacific Island studies class, and outside of school, she worked on the early stages of a bill to add Pacific Island studies in Connecticut schools.

“I don't think I could go through my education and not try to improve the situation for people coming up behind me,” she said.

Once Gabriella, 23, graduates from Quinnipiac in May, she will attend the University of California, Irvine for her Ph.D. in political science. She wants to become a professor with a focus on decolonial perspectives of Indigenous people from Oceania and how ideologies like white supremacy crush ideas from those native to the region.

Just as important, she wants to be a professor that supports students.

"If it wasn't for these educators in my life, I would not be here,” Gabriella said. “I know how much it helped me to have a person like that. So if I could be that person for somebody else one day, then I think that I would have accomplished my goal in life.”