After nine years of hard work, dedication, determination, and perseverance — all while working a fulltime job and raising four children — a California woman has finally passed the bar exam.
As Good Morning America reported, Evelyn Uba’s dreams of becoming a lawyer have now been realized as she completes her career journey that all began nearly four decades ago.
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In 1983, Uba immigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria with the goal of one day becoming a lawyer.
However, those dreams would be put on hold for the next several years as she faced a number of hurdles, including financial difficulties after her father suffered an unexpected stroke. Before he passed away, she promised him she would never stop trying to become a lawyer.
Uba made the difficult decision to temporarily put her career goals on hold while she got married and raised her four children. But in 2005, she decided it was time to get things back on track, and resumed studying law at California Southern Law School.
As Uba explained, she chose that school specifically because it would allow her to continue her studies while also working full-time as a welfare professional and raising her children.
In 2011, she graduated law school, and all that was left to do was take the bar exam and finally become the lawyer she had promised her father she would one day become. But there was just one problem: she couldn’t ever seem to pass.
“I took the exam more than ten times,” Uba told GMA . “I stopped counting after a while but giving up certainly wasn’t in my dictionary.”
Indeed, no matter how many times she received disappointing results, she never let them get her down. In fact, failure just made her work harder.
For nearly a decade, this determined mom would come home from work and immediately hit the books, studying late into the night and sacrificing precious spare time that would have otherwise been spent with her family.
Although they certainly missed their mom, Uba’s family never made her feel guilty for pursuing her dreams.
Instead, they showed her nothing but love and support while she continued to work hard toward finally becoming a lawyer.
As she recalled to GMA, “My daughter, Naeche, once said to me, ‘Mom, if you give up now, you can’t get your time back. Then what would you have gained out of all the missed time you could’ve spent with us?’ So that always stuck in my head and I knew the only time I’d give up is when I’m dead.”
In October of last year, Uba took the exam one last time, and then received her results on January 8, 2021.
Naeche was filming the moment her mom found out that after a decade of trying and failing, she’d finally passed. The now-viral video of Uba jumping and dancing for joy, as well as kissing a photo of her late father, has nearly 400,000 views on Twitter.
“I keep saying to people, ‘You can’t give up,” she explains in the celebratory video. “So, I have to practice what I preach. Perseverance. You don’t give up, you keep trying until it happens.”
Now armed with her law license, Uba plans on working within criminal defense so she can defend low-income people in marginalized communities.
In the meantime, she told GMA she hopes her story of trials to triumph inspires others to keep working hard toward their goals, even when they seem impossible to achieve.
“Eventually it’s going to happen when God says it’ll happen,” she said. “It might not be easy but you just have to keep going and never feel sorry for yourself.”
h/t: Good Morning America
