MOUNTAIN GROVE, Mo. – Rachel Pedraza is a worker. Home health care giver, convenience store clerk, housekeeper. Neighborhood of 80 hours a week at times. Pays the bills.

“I don’t sleep much,” she said.

Pedraza now owns another identity – college graduate.

The Mountain Grove resident is receiving the Associate of Arts in General Studies degree May 20 from Missouri State University-West Plains.

She managed to work so much and be a full-time college student the past two years by taking classes close to home at the Mountain Grove campus’ Shannon Hall.

Pedraza credits the instructors and staff at Shannon Hall and her fellow students for helping her make it this far. Her instructors are knowledgeable and approachable, she said. The computer tech staffers she often turns to in a crunch are patient and skilled. Student friends in her toughest classes – math and chemistry – study with her.

“It’s small. It feels like a community. I feel connected here,” she said.

This, after worrying at first about returning to school and sitting in classrooms with much younger students, some younger than her own two grown-and-gone children.

FUTURE PLANS

Pedraza is not yet done with college. She plans to get a second degree in December – the Associate of Applied Science in General Agriculture from Missouri State-West Plains. She already has begun the required ag-related internships.

Then, she will take aim at a four-year agriculture degree through the Missouri State Outreach program at the West Plains campus. Her interests lie in sustainable agriculture, the environment and wildlife conservation.

“We have a (natural) world that needs to be fixed, and we’d better get to fixin’ it,” she said. “I love the outdoors and I want to be out in it.”