If you work at Georgia Tech, you work with some top-notch talent. If you are really lucky, you get to work with Sadie Marshall.

A financial administrator III in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Sadie has worked alongside some of the most celebrated minds of her generation – actual rocket scientists! – for 12 years. She holds her own - calmly processing both purchase orders and dog-ate-the-paperwork excuses with the same redemptive ‘that’s okay’ trilling from her lips.

Sadie Marshall – mother to 8, grandmother to 15, and great-grandmother to 4 - is rarely ruffled. She has seen too much to trifle with the small stuff. But don’t mistake that calm for complacency. There’s ambition behind those twinkling eyes.

“I don’t want to get old and say ‘oh, I wish I’d done this, or I wish I’d done that,’” she explains. “If I want to do something, I have to make it happen.”

On July 7, 2018 Sadie Marshall added ‘graduate degree’ to her list of accomplishments, earning an MBA with a concentration in human resource management from St. Leo University. Her daughter, LaShonya W. Heard was by her side – literally.

“She [LaShonya] had had 12 classes to finish for her master’s, and I had 10. So about a year ago, I started bugging her, telling her that if she doubled up on some of her classes, we could walk together. She dragged her feet  a little, but I wouldn’t let up.”

A smile of sweet defiance spreads across Sadie’s face.

“And it worked. We graduated the same day.”

It wasn’t the first time Sadie combined charm and determination to get the job done. It probably won’t be the last. The grace she attributes to her Maker. The grit is something she picked up over a lifetime that has seen more than a few injustices.

“I ran into bullies when I was young, and it changed me,” she said. “I prayed to God, asked Him to teach me to not become one. And God just answered my prayers, to where I don’t let other people make me act differently. I will not be bullied.”

That resolution served her well in fifth grade, when Sadie entered her first integrated classroom. Always an ‘A’ student, she immediately noticed something was off.

“All the books the black students had had --all hand-me-downs – were a year behind the ones the white students had been using. So it was hard, but

it was not because we were stupid. It’s because we were not given the same books. We were expected to work twice as hard just to be considered average,” she said.

Grace and grit prevailed.

“Well I was not going to be considered average. And I was not getting stuck in the lower classes.  I worked extra hard, stayed up real late studying, and I found some smart friends to study with me.”

(And they were smart enough to study with her, too.)

Sadie went on to earn her undergraduate degree in accounting while she and her husband Harold were raising six kids and serving in the Army. She says she ‘took 20 years off’ before going back for her graduate degree, but, in truth, she didn’t take anything close to a ‘break.’

“My husband and I had always wanted to help children, the ones who didn’t have a safe place in their lives, because we both thought it was important.  So when our own were older, we started taking classes so we could foster children,” she says.

“We’d learned a lot in the Army about having someone’s back, because your military family is really there for you. We felt we’d have something to give these kids.”

The Marshalls ended up fostering eight children, adopting two of them.The decision to go to graduate school came as her youngest, now 13 and 14, were old enough to be more independent.

But life didn’t get any simpler.

During her first semester in graduate school, Sadie lost her sister-in-law. During her second semester, her son, Anthony, was shot and killed; her sister Louella, suffered a fatal heart attack.

The first thing she’ll tell you is that these tragic events happened after her school’s ‘add/drop’ deadline, so she ‘couldn’t’ drop out. But if you push her a little, Sadie will fess up that it was a little more complicated.

“It was hard, I’m not going to tell you anything different. I wasn’t eating right, and barely sleeping. But if I had stopped, if I’d have given up, it would not have changed anything. It wouldn’t have. And if I kept going, I knew I could change the future,” she said.

“All things are possible through Christ, so I kept going. Hibernated in my work. Got lost in my schoolwork.”

And kept going to her full-time job at Georgia Tech….and kept tending to her two teenagers…and her husband….and….

Like a gift that has been encased multiple times in the most magical of wrapping papers, Sadie Marshall always seems to have had another layer of resilience underneath each challenge she's endured. Another testimony to her faith. Another smile for the undeserving. Another place at the table.

Which has to make you think: is there a Sadie Marshall working in your office? A gift you’ve never unwrapped?

You won’t know until you ask.