Award Nominee graduates from High School with Two VGCC Degrees

When Martha Yosmara Garcia Cervantes of Creedmoor graduates from Vance-Granville Community College on May 16, she will walk across the stage to receive two degrees days before she receives her high school diploma. To Garcia Cervantes (pictured above on VGCC’s Main Campus), this accomplishment is a reminder that America is the “land of opportunity.”

 

Born in Mexico, Garcia Cervantes was young when her family came to the United States in search of a better life. “As the youngest of three children of a poor immigrant family, the odds were not in my favor,” she recalled. “It is not easy to learn a new language or to adapt to a new culture; however, it is not impossible. Learning the language, in my opinion, might have been the easiest part. When I entered school was when the struggle really began.” She did poorly in school at first, but came to realize that education would be the key to living the life that her parents had sacrificed to give her.

 

As she completed middle school, Garcia Cervantes was accepted into Granville Early College High School , which is a partnership of VGCC and the Granville County Schools system. “I realized that I had been given the opportunity of a lifetime,” she said. “Seeing that my friends had not yet realized that an education was important, I had to go and represent my heritage. I had to show everyone that it is possible to achieve greatness and that I was going to be the living proof of it.” She has excelled in the classroom, ranking in the top five of her class each year of high school, and she has made the VGCC Dean’s List. Garcia Cervantes is the only member of her class graduating with not one but two college transfer degrees from VGCC: an Associate in Arts and an Associate in Science .

 

This spring, Garcia Cervantes was named VGCC’s nominee for the North Carolina Community College System’s Dallas Herring Achievement Award. That award was established by the system in 2010 to honor the late Dr. Dallas Herring, the longtime State Board of Education chairman and one of the state’s earliest advocates of community colleges. Each year, the award recognizes a current or former community college student who best embodies Herring’s philosophy of “taking people where they are and carrying them as far as they can go.”

 

For her part, Garcia Cervantes says that “Vance-Granville has carried me very far. From the very first class I took, I knew that I was going places with VGCC.” Now, she wants to pursue a career as a doctor, possibly in the U.S. Army. “All of the disadvantages that I was born with have made me the strong young lady that I am today!”