The Success Equation

The Success Equation

Paul Woods always wanted to make something of himself, but didn’t know how. Once he landed in a stable home, success was his for the taking.

Paul Woods ’14 knew growing up that he had potential, but he did not know how to fulfill it.

As a boy, he lived in a small rural farming town in Illinois with his parents and three siblings. “I grew up in a trailer park where my backyard was literally a cornfield, which was great for playing hide and seek.”

When he was 13, his parents divorced. Then his mother had met a man on the internet.

The man lived in Austin, Pa., 50 miles southeast of Bradford and home to 164 families and the state’s smallest school district. The family packed everything they owned in a rented Suburban and met his stepfather for the first time in a Sheetz parking lot. There were 11 students in Woods’s new freshman class.

Woods, right, at his graduation from Pitt-Bradford in 2014.

After accidentally breaking a window in their trailer in Austin, Woods and his family moved to a small, subsidized house in Port Allegany, Pa. He started high school there in the middle of the year and struggled to make friends and find his place in his fourth school district in two years.

Athletics became his means to making friends. By sophomore year, Woods had joined the track, wrestling and football teams. He enjoyed participating in the sports, but struggled to purchase the proper equipment.

However, a friend of his who worked for a local business, Josh Roach, injured himself lifting weights and mentioned to the business owner that Woods would like to sub in and earn some money toward purchasing new football cleats.

The business owner was Scott Moses, who had grown up poor himself, had put himself through college and been a banker before buying an independent furniture store where he regularly employed a few young men to help move and deliver furniture.

After just two weeks of working for the store, Woods learned that his family had decided to move back to Austin after its home in Port Allegany was deemed unlivable. Woods argued with his mother, and the decision was made that Woods would not make the trip.

“I was desperately looking for a place to stay during the last few weeks of my sophomore year, but didn’t even consider asking the Moseses, whom I barely knew at that time,” Woods said.

Roach approached Scott Moses and his then-wife, Karen, and told them about Woods’s situation.

At first, Scott Moses was against the idea of taking

Woods in. His own children were 7 and 11 at the time. However, he and his wife had considered taking in a child before, and between Josh, his brother, Matt, who was also a friend of Woods’s, and Karen, they convinced Scott to open his home for at least a trial period. For Karen Moses, it was personal; she was adopted herself and had long wanted to help a child who needed it.

It did not take too long before Scott Moses acquiesced to trying the arrangement on a trial basis. Karen Moses and Woods went to his former home and gathered his things – all of which fit in one plastic tote.

“Whether or not he stays, he needs some clothes,” Scott said and suggested Karen take him shopping.

“I sympathized. I know what it was like to have crappy clothes and wear hand-me-downs.”

Woods spent the first summer adjusting to the Moseses’ rules — having a curfew, eating dinner as a family, not texting at the table, going to bed and not playing video games all night.

“There were a lot of new experiences for me when I moved into the Moseses’ home,” he said. “They took me on a vacation, which was the first vacation I had ever been on.” However, the real test came at the end of the summer and into the start of his junior year of high school.

The Moseses explained that in the coming school year, they expected Woods to go to school, do his homework and make an effort.

Woods accepting the Mary and Vincent S. Fierro Award for Excellence in Internal Medicine.

Photo courtesy of LECOM

“We did not expect perfect attendance or a perfect GPA; we just wanted Paul to put in a real effort and do his best,” Karen Moses said. “We treated him as our own child, with all of the same expectations we had for our own children, Christian and Hannah. Our home wasn’t just a place to sleep and eat. It was where we taught him to look people in the eyes when you speak to them, to hold the door for people, to love and respect those around you.”

Karen Moses, a high school math teacher, realized that Woods was very far behind, having missed most of his first two years of high school either sleeping or not attending class. She was dedicated to helping him catch up and spent many nights ensuring he completed his homework and tutoring him in topics in which he should have been proficient.

Woods said, “When I started to succeed, it felt good. All I heard my whole life was ‘You have so much potential.’ I just needed someone to help me reach it.”

The love and support from the Moseses was fuel for the fire for Woods. He had started to make the honor roll and brought his QPA above a 3.0. Scott and Karen encouraged him to think about college. Scott Moses had escaped his childhood poverty by getting an education and encouraged Woods that this would be his best route to secure a future for himself.

“I didn’t know where to start to look for colleges and didn’t even know Pitt-Bradford was so close to home,” Woods said. He was terrified of how he was going to pay for school – his parents had not put any money away, and the Moseses were not in the financial position to pay for his education.

“The amazing financial staff at Pitt- Bradford went out of their way to get me declared an independent student and allowed me to secure the grants and scholarships necessary to attend school,” Woods said.

Woods entered Pitt-Bradford in the fall of 2010, still living with the Moseses and commuting to campus. “I needed the support of Scott and Karen when I first started college. I had barely made it through high school and was not confident in my study habits,” he said.

He thought he might want to do something in health care and loaded up on credits – taking 18 in his first semester to make sure he would finish in four years. He earned his first 4.0 that semester, a freshman academic excellence award and a taste of success that made him hungry for more.

By the end of his sophomore year, he had a 3.97 GPA and started to think about medical school.

“I had never considered medical school when I entered as a freshman, but when I started to succeed in my classes, I made the decision to go for it. I really didn’t want to take a gap year,” he said of a common practice to help students fill out their résumés with research after graduating from college. “I knew if I took time off, I may never go back and fully achieve my goals. Luckily, I had a great mentor in Lauren Yaich.”

Woods was accepted at two medical schools and chose to attend the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Erie. He succeeded there as well and graduated with a nearly perfect GPA. He earned the Mary and Vincent S. Fierro Award for Excellence in Internal Medicine, which is given to the member of the graduating class who has demonstrated clinical expertise in medicine, and was accepted to his firstchoice residency program.

This fall, he began his residency at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., and hopes to eventually complete a fellowship in hematology and oncology – an interest that was first cultivated while doing undergraduate research with Yaich.

“I think deep down I always wanted to do well,” he said. “It just took someone to stand behind me and say, ‘You can do this.’”