Life lessons

She grew up in public housing. She had a baby in high school. Meet Shatara Rutledge, a college student with dreams.

They double-park their vanity-plated Beemers, strut into salons wearing $341 True Religion jeans, and seek French manicures on one hand while sipping Stoli razz spritzers from the other. On the way back to their penthouse dorm suites, they send in their homework assignments from their iPhones.

With more than 60,000 college students living in Boston proper every semester, it's easy to get a warped view of many of them as only the Grey Goose glamour-pusses seen on Newbury Street.

But beyond the blitz of glitz, the truth is that there are many college kids in Boston troubled by more than chipped fingernails.

"Life is a struggle," says one of them, 20-year-old Shatara Rutledge, a first-year transfer student at Roxbury Community College.

Rutledge has the scars on her psyche to prove it. She is still mourning the loss of a Boston friend to street violence. She fears for the safety of her 17-year-old brother, who lives in a corner of Dorchester that is locked and loaded with gang members. She has no real address, and is crashing these days on the floor of a friend of a friend. She lives on a monthly government disability check she gets for being bipolar, and baby-sits on the side. She's navigating the ebbs and flows of financial aid. Oh, and she has a child of her own, a 4-year-old boy named Takwan whom she raised with her family through high school and misses dearly. He's now living in Georgia with Rutledge's mother so she can better concentrate on her studies. Other than that, she's a typical college kid - more typical than one would think.

"I want to succeed in life," she says.

Those who know Rutledge - and the many others like her who remain on their feet despite their daily collisions with the complexities of life - say they wouldn't bet against her. For to even get this far, Shatara Stacy Smith Rutledge has had to star in her own unscripted version of growing up, a kind of real "Real World: Boston."

The oldest of seven children, Rutledge was raised by her mother in the Commonwealth public housing development in Brighton, still known on the streets by its former name, the Fidelis Way projects. Her stepfather was there, too, but they just didn't share a blood bond, she says.

Some in her neighborhood were seduced by the illicit ways of the posse known as FWP, initialized shorthand for Fidelis. Others, like Rutledge, gravitated toward the CTA - the Commonwealth Tenants Association, which tried to divert kids from the grip of dirty dealings.

During after-school programs, Rutledge found comfort at the keyboards of the tenant group's computers, transported by the Web beyond her Brighton borders. Through a collaboration with the tenants association, tutors from Boston College not only helped Rutledge with her basic subjects. They also further broadened her vistas via trips to see BC football games and college dorm culture.

Alex Danesco, a former BC tutor who now is executive director of the tenants group, remembers Rutledge as an 8-year-old challenging the tutors to bring it on before they'd even begun their sessions, saying, "You guys can start now. I need help with my homework."

Those who know Rutledge say it's an attitude that's stuck with her, a desire to be challenged by others - and to challenge herself.

"It has to be in them," Danesco, 33, says of those, like Rutledge, who've made it from Commonwealth to college. "They want something more from themselves."

Siphoning know-how and connections from older role models, Rutledge laid a foundation for her career goal of designing websites and video games. Through her knack for networking, she became involved with the nonprofit Citizen Schools after-class enrichment program. There, she spent 10 Saturdays working with other eighth-graders to create a website for a local hair salon. With the aid of writing coaches, she also went from a girl who had to walk out of the room to ease her tensions about stringing proper sentences together to one who crafted compelling essays on the likes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and musician R. Kelly.

"Her ability to ask for help shows how hard she's willing to try," says Emily Stainer, with Citizen Schools.

But in the ninth grade, Rutledge fell off stride. At 15, she'd gotten pregnant by her boyfriend. Like roughly 80 percent of teen pregnancies nationwide, Rutledge says hers wasn't planned. "I made mistakes growing up," she says.

When she got pregnant, she says, her boyfriend turned cold - then completely turned away. Rutledge floundered, beset by morning sickness and sleepiness.

Some advised her to have an abortion. But she calls that murder, and also doesn't believe in having a baby and giving it away. Rutledge heard the whispers: "You're too young to have a child. You'll never leave the projects."

After the baby was born in 2004, the murmurs became a screech. Rutledge slipped into depression. She thought of dropping out, a familiar option for teen mothers. Nationally, only 63 percent of teenagers who have babies before they reach 18 graduate from high school or get their GEDs, according to Planned Parenthood.

But then Rutledge meditated hard on the naysayers and her newborn - and the stay-in-school urgings of her mother, who says she had Rutledge when she was 18 - and used it all as motivation. She's had minimum-wage jobs, and didn't want a life stuck working the supermarket cash register. She's been sardined into public housing, and wanted a chance to own her own home, maybe in the suburbs, with a pool and a Jacuzzi. "Society always knocks kids who grow up in the projects," Rutledge says. "They think we can't do anything."

Rutledge bucked up and switched from massive Brighton High to the Boston Community Leadership Academy, a public school that stresses smaller classes and a longer academic day. She became a member of the 2005 class of Brian J. Honan fellows, an annual program of the West End House Boys & Girls Club in Allston that helps transform high schoolers into civic leaders. Rutledge was the first and only participant to also be a parent.

Ann Walsh, who managed the fellowship back then, recalls that Rutledge flashed a tenacious streak during her interview. "She was not quick to throw excuses, 'Oh, I can't be there, life is too hard,' " says Walsh, now 36 and a consultant to the program. "She just did stuff."

Rutledge's family cared for Takwan when she was in school. Sometimes asthma attacks sent him to the emergency room. Rutledge would do her high-school homework in the wee hours after he fell asleep.

As a Honan fellow, too, Rutledge had her hands full: She met State House and City Hall pols; learned to differentiate between righteous values and mere political chatter; completed a paid internship with a local advocacy group, during which she sharpened her Web-design skills; chatted with her peers about the ongoing trials and tribulations of Michael Jackson; and solicited from Walsh, a mother, strategies on how to make Takwan eat his fruits-and-veggies baby food.

Today, Rutledge's schedule is still hectic. She rises at six in Codman Square, she says, skips breakfast, takes the bus to the community college. She may or may not eat lunch, does her homework on a library computer until she saves enough money for her own, catches the bus back to Dorchester. She has dinner, often baby-sits, and then stays up till 3 a.m. to finish class assignments. She also chats with girlfriends, hangs with her new boyfriend, and fills out job applications. She makes at least three calls a day to her son, gazing at his picture on her nightstand when she longs to see his face.

Through it all, she says, she tries to stay clear of the street's temptations, but straddling two worlds can be tricky. Shortly after she had her baby, she says, she was jumped by a girl who didn't like her. Rutledge didn't back down.

"I like peace," she says, adding, however, "When you grow up in the 'hood, you can't be a punk. . . . If I have to, I'll fight back."

In the past, she says, she'd sometimes sip a wine cooler to take the edge off her frustrations. These days, she says, she prefers to soothe herself by reading Biblical psalms or writing poetry or listening to R&B slow jams.

Wearing sensible jeans, sneakers, and a hooded sweatshirt, Rutledge says she's not jealous of the collegiate Manolo-manicure-martini crowd. "You have to work your way from the bottom to make it to the top," she says.

At only 20, Rutledge says she believes that, as a serious student, she's making her bones, not by draping them in lavish garb, but by dragging them into the real world every day.