Nicole Dmitrejtschuk was not looking for someone to hand her a future. She was looking for a door.
At seventeen, sitting in a senior-year class at Lakeview Centennial High School in Garland, the Venezuelan-born, first-generation college student already understood something most teenagers don’t: In this country, getting to college and paying for college are two entirely different problems. Dallas County Promise helped her solve both.
“Dallas County Promise was the foundation for my career,” Nicole says today. “They were the first program that gave me the right tools that I needed to get to where I am today.”
At twenty-three, Nicole is the executive assistant to the director of operations at a land surveying firm in the Dallas area. She is the youngest person in the executive suite, and the only woman. That is not an accident. It is the result of a path that was deliberately built, and deliberately taken.
Finding the First Stepping Stones
That path began during the pandemic, when completing the Dallas County Promise Path Form during her senior year set off a chain of events Nicole credits as the foundation of everything that followed. Through the Promise, she was connected with a mentor named Alice, provided through an SMU-partnered college-readiness program. Twice a week, Alice sat down with Nicole and helped her break down the process: financial aid applications, college options, campus visits, and the kind of guidance that is easy to take for granted if your family already knows how it works.
“[Alice] was kind of like the first stepping stone towards my college success,” Nicole says. “I still keep in touch with her. I have her on LinkedIn.”
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With Promise support opening access to scholarship opportunities, Nicole began her college career at Dallas College Eastfield Campus, taking foundational coursework before continuing on to UT Arlington. When scholarship eligibility shifted after her first year, she ultimately transferred to the University of North Texas at Dallas (UNT Dallas), a smaller campus where she found the close-knit community she had been looking for. “I really enjoy that campus. I am very happy I graduated from there,” she says. At both universities, she was building the skills and professional identity that would carry her into her career.
Building Professional Infrastructure
What UNT Dallas gave Nicole was not just a diploma in communications and digital media. It was professional infrastructure. Her coursework included Excel, Google Workspace applications, and the kind of multitasking under pressure that direct supervisors notice in an interview. When she applied for the position, the director of operations hired her over three other candidates. The pay reflected it. “I’m not salary yet—I’m still hourly—but it is definitely more than I was getting paid before,” Nicole says. “It just makes you feel like, wow. I feel very accomplished.”
“He said he knew right away that he felt that connection and that I could help the company grow,” Nicole recalls. The communication skills sharpened in her university courses, the interview preparation built into her final year, the professional confidence that came from finishing what she started: all of it showed up in that interview room.
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Today, Nicole runs the back end of her company’s executive operations from her own office, next door to the boss’s. That includes client and vendor outreach, scheduling, customer surveys, organizational systems, and serving as the connective tissue between leadership and the people they serve. “I kind of feel like I’m the mini boss when he’s not here,” she says, and she means it as a statement of fact, not a boast.
The Power of a Connected Path
Nicole’s journey is what Dallas County Promise means when it talks about putting every student on a path to a living wage. Not a single program. Not a single institution. A connected sequence of people, schools, and opportunities: Lakeview Centennial High School, Dallas County Promise, Dallas College Eastfield Campus, UNT Dallas, and an SMU-partnered mentorship program that together made a future possible that Nicole could not have built alone, in pieces, without any of them.
Her advice to the junior or senior who is not sure the Promise applies to them: “It’s helpful, even if you’re not sure what career you want to do. I believe they provide all the information that you need, and just kind of make you not feel alone. You might feel overwhelmed and stressed, because at eighteen you don’t really know what you want to do—but they can definitely help you figure out what career you want.”
The door was always there. Dallas County Promise helped her find it.
