No phones are allowed if Simone Minor is in the car.
It’s a tradition that dates back at least to high school, when Minor would drive 40 minutes from her hometown of Bear, Delaware, to her college-preparatory school in Wilmington.
“It was the middle point on my mom’s way to work in Philadelphia,” said Minor, who will graduate from the University of Virginia in May. “I grew up in a household led by one parent and with my big sister. My mother was in charge of pickup and drop-off. But as you can imagine, in an all-girl household, it wasn’t always easy to get out the door, so we were always playing the blame game.”
Minor’s mother, Yvette Russell, would drive another 40 minutes to her job as a vice president at a nonprofit agency. Minor’s school day would end around 6 p.m., when she finished club meetings and practices for the various sports she played: volleyball, track and swimming, mainly. School administrators set a limit on how late students could stay on campus, but friendly custodians and teachers let Minor stay past the official limit. After a long day for mother and daughter, it might have been easy to slip into silent scrolling. Neither wanted to do that.
“When you have a busy schedule, that’s your time to talk without distraction. It was definitely an investment in time, and we needed it to maintain balance,” Russell said.
During their commute, Minor and her mother would talk about Minor’s schoolwork or how she might help a struggling classmate. They blasted the “Hamilton” soundtrack on repeat. The two were already close – while Minor has a sister 12 years her senior, it was usually just her and her mother on the long commute to high school – but both agreed the drives deepened their bond. They still talk daily.
They also discussed serious issues. Russell used to describe Minor as a “little person with big ideas.”
Her new high school came as a shock to her system. Most of her new classmates had known each other since preschool, with long-standing friendships.
Minor poses for a photo in the Women’s Center library. Minor is an editor for the center’s Iris Magazine. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
“That was on top of the fact that I was a minority in the school racially,” Minor, who is Black, said. “I started having those cookie-cutter experiences, like people assuming I cheated if I earned a better grade than they did.”
In addition to leading her school’s Black Student Union and establishing new traditions within the organization, she and her best friend founded a gender equity club to better understand the issues she and her peers faced. It was around this time that she met a Drexel University biostatistics professor, Loni Philip Tabb, who became a mentor to Minor and with whom she’s published a paper on heart health disparities.
Minor, now a major in global public health and sociology with a data science minor, initially thought she wanted to pursue a career in law, but Tabb showed her she could make a difference in STEM. Minor’s mother, for her part, had a feeling Minor would pursue science ever since she completed an ambitious middle school science project.
“She’s always had this level of precision. With questions like that, I would always say, ‘Let’s ask Simone,’” Russell said.
