Barbara and I wrote SEARCH: A Guide to College and Life . Below are  our biographies.

 

Jeff Duffey: When Barbara and I met we did not realize both of our dad's were connected to the circus. At 58, my dad became a Shriner clown. Like Barbara’s dad, he too grew up during the Great Depression. Dad pushed a mower to cut the lawns of Middle Ga. College his freshman year. He fell a hundred dollars short of raising enough money to return. Even if it meant working two jobs, my dad was determined that his kids would complete college. When I started college, I had turned 17 the week before. I had no idea just how inexperienced, poor, inattentive, and out-of-my-league I was. I did know one thing. I had to make it. My dad was right. Davidson College changed my life. I want you to use this book to open your eyes to what is ahead, so you too will make it.

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Barbara Roquemore: If I had any doubt about my need for college, a summer working in a hot cotton mill settled it. When I wonder where I got the belief that I could be the first in my family to go to college, I remember my dad. He ran away from his orphanage with his younger brother during the Great Depression to join the circus where he became a trapeze artist. I paid my way through college keeping the books for the service station where I and other coeds, wearing bikinis, pumped gas for tourists going to Florida. After-hours and weekends, I ironed new shipments of clothing for a dress store, was a hand and foot model, and won a beauty contest for prize money to supplement a small academic scholarship. I tell my students, “if a poor Appalachian girl with circus roots can complete college, anyone can.” (Barbara enjoyed spending a month at Oxford in 1988 studying UK schools.)

Here are our credentials:

Dr. Jeff Duffey has been the board-certified psychiatrist for GCSU’s Counseling Center for 10 years. A Davidson and Medical College of Georgia graduate, he completed his psychiatric residency at Baltimore’s Sheppard-Pratt Hospital. He has been a clinical Assistant Professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland, Emory University, and Mercer University Medical Schools. He has treated students in an adolescent psych hospital, a residential treatment center, and his private practice. Jeff and Barbara are married and live outside Atlanta.

Dr. Barbara Roquemore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Professional Learning and Innovation and Director of the Doctoral Program at Georgia College and State University. Before coming to GCSU 14 years ago, she completed a 34-year career in K-12 education as a high school basketball coach, English teacher, principal, curriculum director, and an assistant school superintendent. A Tift College graduate, she got her M.Ed. at Georgia State University and her Ed.D. at the University of Georgia.