“Finding Her Pace”: How a Zoom Talk, a Mentor, and a Return to School Reframed Theresa Clayton’s Path

Before Theresa Clayton found City Tutors again, she was juggling two clocks. One kept time for a demanding full-time job. The other ticked toward a degree she had left on pause years earlier. Back in 2016 and 2017, when City Tutors was still housed at City College, she leaned on tutoring to get through statistics while adjusting to classes after work. Then life accelerated. School slipped to the margins.

She never lost the thread, though. She stayed on the email list, dropped into events when she could, and last year clicked into an online session about productivity. The topic sounded useful. The speaker, Kerry Ann King, a psychologist who talked candidly about being neurodivergent and the systems she built to work with her brain, not against it, sounded familiar in the best way.

“I didn’t know exactly what I needed,” Theresa said. “I just knew I needed to know this person.”

After the Zoom, she reached out. Kerry Ann wrote back. They met. Kerry Ann King gave her permission to be ambitious and specific, to organize her energy instead of punishing it. She shared a tool she was building, an app called Fin, and invited Theresa to beta test it. Keeping tasks in one place, tracking habits, watching consistency stack up day by day: small mechanics that add up to momentum. “It helped me focus,” Theresa said. “It also rebuilt confidence.”

By then Theresa had returned to City College in January 2024 with graduation in sight this spring. The question wasn’t whether she could finish; it was what the finish should point toward. She had long been drawn to psychology but couldn’t see the contours of a career. With Kerry Ann, the fog lifted. They talked use cases and pathways, what clinical work might look like, what research might ask of her, and the kind of community she could serve.

Some of the push was practical: time-blocking, interview prep, tightening how she introduced herself. Some was deeper: how identity and lived experience shape care, why representation among psychologists matters, and how a clinician who understands culture and context can lower the friction in the room. Theresa had felt that gap as a patient. She wanted to be the person who closed it for someone else.

“I hadn’t thought beyond grad school,” she said. “She made me consider a PhD, not as a fantasy, but as something my work could actually support.”

What Theresa describes most about her mentor is a quality that’s harder to name than advice. It’s follow-through: the gentle nudge before a deadline, the check-in that keeps good intentions from fading. “She meets you where you are,” Theresa said. “She helps you keep going without pushing you past what you can do.”

City Tutors threaded the rest. Years earlier, the program caught her when statistics felt like a wall. Now, as an alum who returned mid-career to finish a degree, it offered different rooms: a talk that resonated, a warm introduction to a mentor, and the reminder through hikes, socials, and small gatherings that community is part of study, not an ornament around it. “I could go in and out as life allowed,” she said. “It still felt like mine.”

The relationship refocused her days. Classwork gained rhythm. The app nudged her into consistency. Conversations with Kerry Ann gave shape to the long view: what kind of psychologist she might be, the skills to build now, and the voice she’d need in rooms where care is designed and delivered.

If her story sounds straightforward on paper, it wasn’t in real time. It rarely is. It moved through a familiar cycle: stretch, stall, recalibrate, move again. What changed wasn’t just her schedule but her stance. She knows how to introduce herself now. She knows what she’s studying for. She knows who she wants to be in the room for.

When asked to summarize City Tutors, she goes back to the beginning and forward at once. It worked when she first returned to school years ago; it worked again when she came back as a working adult. The continuity mattered. So did the design: tutoring when she needed it, mentoring when she was ready for it, and a community that kept its doors open between the two.

When asked to summarize Kerry Ann King, her answer is simple: “Insightful. Genuine. She meets you where you are and follows through.”

Theresa talks about the future in the same plain terms she’s learned to use in interviews. Finish the degree. Keep building the habits that make hard things routine. Apply to graduate programs that fit who she is and who she wants to serve. In her version of the field, more people sit across from clinicians who see them clearly. She hopes to be one of those clinicians.

The story could end on the app or the checklists. It doesn’t. It ends where it began, with a person who sensed a door and decided to knock. A link led to a talk; a talk led to a mentor; a mentor helped turn a direction into a path. The work is still hers. But the path is visible now, and that is no small thing.