Graduate Spotlight: Ursula Jaimes

THE AURORA ALWORTH SPIRIT AWARD

The Aurora Alworth Spirit Award recognizes a Capital IDEA graduate who embodies resilience, determination, and the spirit of opportunity—someone who has faced obstacles head-on and emerged stronger. The 2025 Aurora Alworth Spirit Award was generously supported by our Transformation Champion sponsor, Ascension Seton. Thank you!

URSULA JAIMES — 2025 AURORA ALWORTH SPIRIT AWARD HONOREE

Some stories are about rising. Ursula’s is about rising, falling, and rising again — and again — until the dream she never let go of finally became her life. 

Ursula first came to Capital IDEA in 2019 at 23 years old, a single mother to a three-year-old daughter named Mia. She arrived carrying something many students carry quietly: the memory of a previous attempt at college that hadn’t worked out. After leaving school in 2014 with a 1.25 GPA, she had spent years working, growing, and figuring out who she wanted to be. “I was honestly afraid,” she reflects, “because I had tried college right after high school, and it didn’t work out.” 

But fear didn’t stop her. It informed her. 

In those years between her first attempt at college and her enrollment with Capital IDEA, Ursula discovered something important about herself: she was drawn to dentistry. With no way to afford formal training, she found another way in. Working as a receptionist at Manos de Cristo, she spent her days off studying alongside volunteer dentists who took her under their wing and mentored her. Through sheer self-motivation, she learned enough to pass her certification exam and became a dental assistant — an early and vivid sign of the resourcefulness and grit that would define everything that followed. 

When she found Capital IDEA and learned her tuition could be fully covered, something shifted. “I believed it,” she says, “and I knew I would give it my all — and I did.” 

Her goals entering the program were clear: earn straight A’s, balance school with motherhood, and set a powerful example for Mia. She chose to work PRN so she could prioritize her studies, and with the support of her family, her Breakthrough advisor, and her Career Navigator, she entered her classes with renewed purpose. 

And then life intervened — in the hardest possible way. 

In March 2020, just before the world shut down, Ursula lost her grandmother and traveled to Mexico for the funeral. She returned to find her classes had moved entirely online. In the months that followed, she and several family members became sick during the earliest and most frightening days of the pandemic. She lost an aunt to COVID-19. Grief, illness, isolation, and academic disruption arrived all at once. She struggled. She went quiet for a time. She came close to being placed on suspense. 

Yet she did not give up. 

Recognizing she needed to regroup, Ursula made a decision that required real maturity: she stepped back, worked full time, and focused on clearing her academic and financial holds. Then she built a plan — a careful, structured, long-term plan — to retake every course she had dropped, rebuild her GPA, and meet the highly competitive admissions standards for Austin Community College’s Dental Hygiene Program, one of the most rigorous allied health programs at ACC. It was not a shortcut. It was a climb. And she committed to every step of it. 

By early 2023, after two semesters away, she had followed through. She applied to the Dental Hygiene Program and was accepted. From the moment she entered in Fall 2023, her performance and confidence soared. She progressed steadily through every level of the program — and in May 2025, she graduated. 

She is quick to share the credit. “I’m so grateful for the community that supported me,” she says — naming her Career Navigator, Sister Ane, her mentors, and her dental hygiene cohort with particular warmth. “We were all going through challenges, but we helped each other get through them.” Her parents, too, were a constant source of encouragement. “Your daily morning texts mean a lot,” she told them in her award remarks. 

But at the center of everything, always, was Mia. “She is my greatest inspiration,” Ursula says. “She watched me go through the dental hygiene program, and she sacrificed time with me while I worked and studied. I know she’s as proud of me as I am of her.” 

Just two months after graduation, in July 2025, Ursula was hired by Council Oak Periodontist at $50 per hour — a number that carries extraordinary meaning when you trace the distance from her days of self-study on her days off, to a certification earned on her own terms, to a degree fought for through pandemic and grief and perseverance that simply would not quit. 

It is for all of these reasons — the setbacks met with intention, the plans rebuilt from scratch, the refusal to let circumstances decide her story — that Ursula was selected to receive the Aurora Alworth Spirit Award at Capital IDEA’s 2025 Celebration. The award honors the memory of one of Capital IDEA’s earliest students, Aurora Alworth, whose commitment to her education continued without pause even as she underwent cancer treatment, and who inspired her fellow students until her passing in 2002. The Spirit Award is given each year to a graduate who embodies that same unwillingness to surrender to circumstance. 

Ursula was unable to accept her award in person, but her words written for the occasion said everything. 

“It’s true that I overcame a lot,” she reflected. “Life certainly didn’t stop while I was in school. So for anyone who’s struggling right now, or is getting ready to start a new chapter — find your community, find your people, and find the resources you need. They’ll make a difference.” 

And her closing words are ones we expect will stay with anyone who reads them: 

“Even through hardships, remember — it’s all going to be worth it.” 

For Ursula, it surely has been.