FULLERTON – Sunshine Lawson lost her sight 10 years ago, the day a would-be murderer held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

The bullet blinded her but almost miraculously left her brain undamaged. It failed to destroy her heart's deepest desire.

This morning, Lawson, 34, will fulfill that desire - and also impart some hard-won wisdom to her fellow graduating classmates at California State University, Fullerton.

Lawson takes her spot on the podium as the recipient of university's top academic honor. She graduates with a double major, earning perfect grades while raising three children as a single mom.

KEY FACTS

Sunshine Lawson
Age: 34
Born: Puerto Rico
Awards and degrees: President's Associates Scholastic Award, the university's top academic honor; summa cum laude B.A. degrees in criminal justice and Afro-ethnic studies.
Favorite book: "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass"
Heroes: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey
Favorite TV show: "The Bernie Mac show"
Favorite musical artist: Jackie Wilson, the original Temptations
Favorite Web site: Amazon.com and musicspace.com
Regret: She has to miss seeing a personal appearance by actress Susan Lucci of "All My Children" at Disneyland this weekend because she's too busy accepting CSUF awards.
Aids: Uses a talking computer with a regular keyboard. Knows some Braille but not fluent. Has a home helper. Can still visualize people and places in her mind; likes to have things described to her.

For certain, she can speak about overcoming adversity. Even when living in a homeless shelter with her children, she said, her biggest aspiration was to go to college.

"My ultimate goal is to become a college professor and do advocacy for social justice and equal rights," Lawson said Thursday, sitting in the tidy, attractive town house she shares with her three teenage children, a parrot and a German shepherd. "I know what it's like to be victimized and be invisible in this society."

Lawson grew up poor in Puerto Rico and moved to the United States at age 10. At 16, living in the Bronx, she married her boyfriend and had her first child - life decisions that forced her to delay her dream of finishing her education.

Later, she fled an abusive marriage, divorced, had two more children and started college in New York, cleaning houses to help make ends meet.

"I thought life couldn't get any better than that," she remembers. "Three babies and going to college."

But that happiness was taken from her in the early 1990s - she doesn't want to say exactly when - when a group of people pretending they wanted to sublease her Bronx apartment robbed it instead.

One of the robbers pulled out a gun, she said, and shot her point-blank as her children watched. The bullet entered her left temple, severed her optic nerve and exited on the right.

"The last thing I ever remember seeing was the gun and my baby's face," she said.

The robbers were never caught. Today, the only visible signs of the wound are tiny scars on either side of her green eyes.

The crime began a nightmarish period in Lawson's life. At one point, she said, the state of New York tried to take her children away, saying she could not care for them.

After her injury, Lawson said, people "labeled me as broken." "I was one of 'those' people. I was invisible. I was not considered normal anymore, but inside my heart kept screaming, 'I come from your world! I am no different from you!'"

A blind employee at the shelter where she lived taught her the basics of living without sight.

After years of poverty, Lawson received funding from the New York State Crime Victims Board, created in 1966 to compensate innocent victims of crime. The cost of rehabilitation was included.

The fund paid for the family's 1997 move to Fullerton and continued to help finance her education through the Bachelor of Arts degrees she's receiving this weekend. The California Department of Rehabilitation also helps with school expenses, she said. Disability income and scholarships have helped pay the rest of the bills for Lawson and her three teenagers.

After graduating with honors from Fullerton College, Lawson began attending CSUF in 1998 and immediately won the admiration of her professors.

It has not been easy.

She has a human guide to help her from one classroom to the next, but she refuses to use a white cane on campus, saying she doesn't want people to think of her as different.

Her kids - two boys and a girl - read her textbooks to her. She writes her papers on an ancient DOS-based computer with voice-recognition software that allows her to hear what is on the screen but is so obsolete she can't get e-mail on it. She hopes to buy a Pentium if she's accepted into one of the criminal-justice Ph.D. programs she is pursuing.

"I'm not going to say I don't miss my sight, but I'm not going to have a pity party about it," Lawson said.

CSUF criminal-justice professor James Lasley said he didn't even realize that Lawson was blind for the entire term she was in his statistics class.

"I noticed she would come up and talk to me and have a little trouble getting back to her seat, and she was a little pushy with her tape recorder when she taped the lectures, but I had no idea," Lasley said. "She just memorized her way around and never once said anything about her disability."

She earned the highest grades Lasley had ever given.

In fact, since 1998, the stocky brunette has managed to earn straight A's in criminal justice and Afro-ethnic studies, while also completing certificate programs in forensics and technical writing.

For that, Cal State Fullerton has given her the President's Associates Scholastic Award. She will speak at commencement exercises today for Afro-ethnic-studies graduates and on Sunday for criminal-justice graduates.

"I'm going to tell the students, 'Don't let your dreams die.' People told me, 'Now that you've got kids, you'll never go to college. Now you're blind, you'll never go. You're Puerto Rican and you're blind, you'll never have the American dream.'"