She Came Back to Prove Something — To Herself

Geraldine Trujillo-Santistevan has spent 25 years in education. She has been a teacher, a principal, an administrator, and for the past two years, the Director of Student Teaching and Experiential Programming at Colorado State University Pueblo. On May 16, she will walk across a commencement stage as Dr. Trujillo-Santistevan — one of the first graduates of CSU Pueblo’s inaugural Doctor of Education cohort.

She will also walk alongside the undergraduate and graduate students she teaches.

“Not only do I get to graduate as a doctor, but I get to graduate with my undergraduate students and with my master’s students,” she said. “That’s just the silver lining of it.”

Her students have their own word for it. Cool. Really cool, actually.

Trujillo-Santistevan started at CSU Pueblo as an undergraduate, halfway through an industrial engineering degree before a single class observation changed everything. Watching Dr. Jenny Piazza teach, something clicked. She was already leading youth programs at her parish. Her parents, when she came home to announce the major change, told her they could have told her that years ago.

She graduated, entered the classroom, earned a principal licensure from Adams State University, spent a decade in administration, then returned to teaching. When Dr. Piazza and Dr. Jeff Paquette reached out about a new doctoral program forming at CSU Pueblo, her first instinct was hesitation.

Her husband’s response was not.

She signed up.

The EdD program is CSU Pueblo’s first, and the spring 2026 cohort represents its inaugural graduates — students who defended their dissertations and completed a program that did not exist when most of them began their careers. Trujillo-Santistevan is among them, having balanced full-time work, teaching responsibilities, family, and doctoral coursework simultaneously for two years.

There was a moment she almost did not finish.

It came during the IRB review process — the institutional review of her early dissertation chapters. She opened the feedback during her lunch break, in her campus office, and counted 194 corrections. Her stomach dropped. Her heart raced. She had a panic attack.

What surfaced in that moment was something older than the dissertation. Trujillo-Santistevan has dyslexia, a fact she rarely shares. Years earlier, a teacher had looked at her struggling with reading and told her she would not amount to anything — a verdict delivered in red marks on a child’s paper, the kind that follows a person far longer than a grade ever should.

Seeing those 194 corrections felt, in her words, like PTSD. Like failure. Like confirmation.

“I felt like I failed my committee. I felt like I failed myself.”

She composed herself enough to get through her one o’clock appointment. She went home that night and cried to her husband. Then she called Dr. Piazza.

Her committee chair did not minimize what Trujillo-Santistevan was feeling. She also did not let her stay there. Piazza scheduled dedicated time, outside of work hours, to go through every tracked change line by line. She told her clearly: the reviewers were not questioning her. They were offering new eyes.

“You have the support a thousand percent from your whole committee,” Piazza told her.

Thirty minutes into a conversation with her family that same evening, something shifted. The self-doubt gave way to something else — something Trujillo-Santistevan traces back to years of playing soccer and softball, that athlete’s refusal to leave a game unfinished.

Trujillo-Santistevan describes understanding CSU Pueblo differently now than she did as an undergraduate. Back then she knew her departments, her professors, the people at the front desks. Working inside the institution has shown her everything that runs beneath the surface — the coordination, the collaboration, the number of people working to hold a student’s experience together.

“Everybody has a place and a part in order to make the system better,” she said.

Her plan after graduation is straightforward: stay. She wants to continue in her current role and, when a faculty position opens in the School of Education, step into it fully. She wants to retire at CSU Pueblo. She has wanted this for a long time.

For students coming behind her, particularly those contending with the a former teachers of the world who start writing your story before you have had a chance to write it yourself, she has a message she does not soften.

“You don’t let them win. You are strong. You are going to become a leader and you have to have it within yourself.”

CSU Pueblo’s spring commencement is scheduled for Saturday, May 16, 2026.