Eighteen-year-old Chloe Thomas has bounced around to so many schools and dwellings in her short life that she’s had trouble finding a peaceful and consistent space to call home — so she created one.
The recent graduate of Humble ISD’s Quest Early College is among 529 scholarship recipients selected by the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo this year, and she’s already moved onto campus at Rice University to build a bright future for herself.
Thomas admittedly is not a rodeo kid, the traditional belt-buckle donning calf roper who goes through the HLSR scholarship program. She’s attended the rodeo, but she’s more likely to spend her time writing code for a computer program than feeding chickens or barrel racing.
But when she learned that the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was awarding $20,000 per student to hundreds of youth across Texas, she saw a window of possibility that included an electrical engineering degree at Rice.
“I want to be able to give back to my community,” Thomas said. “I want to create accessible technology for people who come from similar positions as me. I came from a low-income background. I know how easy it is, once you have your hands on technology, to create your future with it, and I want that to be easier for others.”
In her high school’s Advancement Via Individual Determination program, Thomas learned of the HLSR scholarship. The Rodeo will dole out $28 million this year to support Texas youth and statewide educational programs. Sixty-six percent of this year’s recipients are female and about half are first-generation college students.
“These students represent the very best of Texas, and supporting their education is at the heart of everything we do,” said Chris Boleman, RodeoHouston president and CEO, in a press release, noting that HLSR is one of the largest annual scholarship providers in the country. “Watching these students shine is a powerful reminder of our purpose.”
The scholarship allows Thomas an opportunity not just to attend her dream school but to not have to work while she’s taking classes and adjusting to college life. She’s still a teenager, after all.
Growing up as an Afro-Latina in several different homes and school districts, Thomas says she was raised by her grandmother, mother and aunt. The strong, hardworking women taught her essential skills and how to “do life.”
“I didn’t do pre-K; it was just my grandmother teaching me,” Thomas said. “I knew how to read and write a little bit before I started elementary school, and I attribute that to her, because she was always there. It does take a village, and I’m grateful for the village I have.”
During her freshman year of high school in Humble, her mother’s rental home burned in what started as a grass fire. The fire didn’t destroy everything, but it meant Thomas and her mother had to move — again.
“I moved around quite a bit and lived all over Houston,” she said. “I went to school in Spring. I used to go to school at Fondren Elementary School on the south side. I went to school in Louisiana, and then I went to school in Dallas for a bit.”
She set specific times for when she would do her homework and “stayed true” to the work ethic her family instilled in her. Coding, or computer programming, became a means of escape, the one thing she could control in “a world of uncertainty.”
“Nothing else could pull me away from it,” she said of her studies.
Now Thomas is interested in developing online games and building tech programs for people with sensory issues. But she also might go to law school or own a bakery one day. Thomas said she hopes to show women with diverse ethnic backgrounds and financial challenges that they can do anything and “break free from the cycle of instability.”
“Technology is a male-dominated field,” Thomas said, noting that Black and Hispanic women are rarely engaged in software development. “I wanted to be able to create a space and have representation, starting younger, and introducing other people who are my age and look like me to something I love. The younger you start, the better.”
In high school, she founded a branch of the technology club “Girls Who Code” and introduced young women to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics program. She created a computer science team to compete in UIL competitions.
“There were no computer science classes at my school, so it was really just us teaching each other how to code competitively, what is binary, and things like that,” she said. “If you have two blocks and you stack them on top of each other, that is essentially what coding is. It’s blocks of code stacked on top of each other that work together to make a whole program.”
The student says she chose to study at Rice because of its academic reputation and because it’s close to home.
“[My mother] said if I was going to go to college anywhere else, she would move with me,” Thomas said. “It offered great financial aid and it’s a top 20 campus. It’s very good for my major and places well into big tech companies. I love having a community of people where they’re not all the same discipline or year, but you’re still connected with other people.”
In the fall, she wants to join the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the National Black Society of Engineers.
Thomas is taking calculus, discrete math, and coding this summer and living in a dorm room at Rice. She’s learning how to navigate the METRO public transportation system and feels like a big city kid for the first time in her life. It seems, she says, that she’s finally found a place to call home.
And while Chloe Thomas may not look like most of the other “rodeo kids,” to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo scholarship committee, she is perfect.
