{"id":11612,"date":"2010-04-02T10:11:04","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T14:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=11612"},"modified":"2021-01-06T09:21:46","modified_gmt":"2021-01-06T14:21:46","slug":"lalita-booth-featured-on-cbs-evening-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/lalita-booth-featured-on-cbs-evening-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Lalita Booth Featured on CBS Evening News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>College of Business Administration\u00a0alumna <strong>Lalita Booth<\/strong>, &#8217;09, was introduced to a national audience recently when she appeared in a segment titled \u201cThe American Spirit\u201d on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Correspondent Michelle Miller interviewed Lalita and delved into her remarkable \u201chomeless to Harvard\u201d story. Of her improbable journey to great success, Lalita says, \u201cit&#8217;s an amazing feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At 16, Lalita was legally emancipated from her parents, and dropped out of high school to support herself. By 17 she was married; by 18 she was a mother. She struggled with poverty, homelessness and single motherhood for four years before enrolling at Seminole Community College (now Seminole State College) in 2004. In 2006 she came to UCF, where she founded the Lighthouse for Dreams Financial Literacy Project, a not-for-profit program dedicated to helping teens and foster children learn how to manage money. In 2009 she graduated with Honors in the Major as the College of Business Administration\u2019s Top Honor Graduate, with degrees in accounting and finance. She was also awarded the Order of Pegasus (the highest honor UCF awards to students), the UCF Alumni Association\u2019s Distinguished Student Award, and became UCF\u2019s first Truman Scholar.<\/p>\n<p>Now at Harvard, Lalita is earning her master\u2019s in business and public policy, and spends time on Capitol Hill, where she lobbies for single mothers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"College of Business Administration\u00a0alumna Lalita Booth, &#8217;09, was introduced to a national audience recently when she appeared in a segment titled \u201cThe American Spirit\u201d on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Correspondent Michelle Miller interviewed Lalita and delved into her remarkable \u201chomeless to Harvard\u201d story. Of her improbable journey to great success, Lalita says, \u201cit&#8217;s an amazing feeling.\u201d At&hellip;","protected":false},"author":132,"featured_media":11615,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-twocol.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"lazy_load_responsive_images_disabled":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[650],"tu_author":[],"class_list":["post-11612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-college-of-business-administration","tag-burnett-honors-college"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v22.3 (Yoast SEO v27.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Lalita Booth Featured on CBS Evening News | University of Central Florida News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"College of Business 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