Vanessa Blacknall-Jamison remembers how mad she was when her high school adviser told her that she should go to secretary college after graduation in 1973. “I remember coming home and being so upset with her because I wanted do to something more than that,” Blacknall-Jamison said. “And my mother told me, ‘You can either take it negatively or positively; maybe she said that to motivate you.’ And so I took it as a motivator and that lead me on this path of determination.” Southeast Aurora’s Blacknall-Jamison, 61, is about defying the odds.