She Kept Going: Dawn Roberts Earns Her Master's at Coppin State
As a graduate student at Coppin State University, Dawn Roberts turned personal trial into a calling to help others heal.
Dawn Roberts
Master of Science, Clinical Mental Health Rehabilitation Counseling
Hometown: Baltimore, Maryland
Somewhere in the audience at Coppin State University's spring commencement on Friday, May 22, a little girl watched her mother do exactly what she had promised. Dawn Roberts crossed the stage and received her Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Rehabilitation Counseling, closing a two-year chapter that nearly stopped her more than once.
For Roberts, completing her master's was never simply about earning a degree. It was about keeping a promise.
It began in 2024 with a high-risk pregnancy and the birth of a daughter with serious health concerns who arrived just before the school year began. Roberts spent her early semesters balancing coursework with feedings, follow-up appointments, and the constant vigilance of a new mother whose child needed close care.
"My baby was born with health issues, and I still wanted her to know mommy was going to keep going all while ensuring she was ok," Roberts said.
She kept going. And then came July.
Just after midnight on July 27, 2025, Roberts was outside a Federal Hill bar celebrating her 39th birthday when a stray bullet struck her in the back. While she was not the intended target, the bullet exited through her left arm and shattered bones all the same.
She started the fall semester in a sling. The weeks that followed brought blood clots, a calendar full of specialists, physical therapy, and the helplessness of being unable to lift her own daughter. She enrolled in four classes anyway.
The field Roberts chose to study is no accident. Though she earned a biotechnology degree from Sojourner-Douglass College in Baltimore in 2012, Roberts never worked in a lab. She spent more than a decade in human services, building a career in case management at the Maryland Division of Rehabilitation Services (DORS) and The Arc, walking alongside people navigating disability, recovery, and the systems meant to support them. The shift to counseling was a natural next step, a discipline built around the very experiences she has both witnessed with her clients and lived through herself. The work involves helping people rebuild after trauma, navigate medical recovery, and find the resilience to carry them forward. The lessons she absorbed in Coppin's classrooms and the lessons she lived at home were never far apart.
Coppin's Clinical Mental Health Rehabilitation Counseling program prepares graduates to work with individuals and families facing mental health challenges, physical disabilities, and the aftermath of life-altering events. The work demands clinical skills and human understanding in equal measure.
Roberts brings both.
As she looks ahead to her next chapter, she does so as a wife, a mother, a survivor, and a Coppin graduate whose lived experience will shape every client she serves.
The work she trained for begins now. And the little girl in the audience will grow up knowing her mother kept her promise.
