“I’m going to put a sign on my back: ‘Don’t make me do rhetorical analysis,’” Bernadine Hedrick said. Hedrick wrote Melissa Hisle, her instructor for ENG 111, after she satisfactorily passed the online class, confessing to her that she still did not know what a rhetorical analysis was.

She laughs it off, having made it through most of her career without knowing what it is. “I was surrounded by younger people coming in straight from high school. They are used to this,” she said.

The 68-year-old will graduate from Beaufort County Community College in the spring of 2017 with a degree in medical office administration.

After spending her career in business, she returned to college to find that the academic world had changed significantly since the late 1960s when she first attended college.

The jovial student had a more somber reason for returning to college. Shortly after her daughter Brette had received two degrees and two certificates from BCCC, she passed away from complications related to her diabetes, with which she had struggled all her life. Hedrick mourned the loss of her daughter, but decided the best way to work through it was to follow in her footsteps by attending BCCC herself and even pursuing the same field.

In 2001, she and Brette moved to Beaufort County, buying a house out on N.C. Highway 171. An investor bought three equestrian products companies from around the country, combined them into the English Equestrian Group and moved them to Washington. The company offered all of the employees a position in the new location and was generous with helping her relocate — paying for her move, doubling her salary and even helping with her down payment on her home.

Hedrick’s co-workers were more apprehensive about her move, but jobs were few in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and management insisted the company was fine. She could not refuse such a great offer.

Two months after leaving Pennsylvania, she found out about the company’s financial woes. In 2003, EEG closed its doors. She and 80 other employees would have to figure out what to do.

In March 2003, she agreed to start up a new location for a similar company in Front Royal, Virginia. The job entailed finding a warehouse, hiring warehouse personnel and shifting production from Granbury, Texas.

“I taught two warehouse workers how to use the computer and basically taught all of them everything I knew,” Hedrick recalled. She was not pleased with Fort Royal and left in 2005 after successfully transitioning the company.

She worked for an employment agency for five years, and was made a permanent employee of Stanadyne, but layoffs at Stanadyne left her unemployed once more. She was forced to file for Social Security retirement after her unemployment benefits ran out.

Her daughter’s health also began to decline. When Brette had a heart attack, Bernadine was told she would not reach 50. Over the next year and a half, she was in and out of the hospital. She passed away at the age of 44 in December 2011.

Hedrick was left alone with her dogs, which she fostered and adopted over the years, and unintentionally named all names that begin with “s”: Skamp, Shoe, Splash and Stitch.

Hedrick said she felt like she needed some more marketable skills. After leaving college in her youth, she remembers thinking, “One day I’ll get back to that.” But it never happened.

She received a Pell grant and enrolled at BCCC. “Everything had changed,” she recalled about her classes. “I had been typing for 50 years; it was not the technical part. The form and style had changed.”

Carol Ingalls, her instructor, did not think she was going to make it. “She’d hover over me,” Ingalls said.

Hedrick had learned to type on a manual typewriter. One day, Ingalls brought one into class to see if the students would know what it was. She told Hedrick to not say a thing. The class guessed it was a label-maker.

Ingalls encouraged and supported Hedrick, helping her through the semester.

Memories of her daughter were still fresh on campus. Instructor Debra Baker immediately made the connection. “You’re Brette’s mother,” Baker said.

Hedrick got used to it and had new insight on her daughter��s life. “I don’t know how she did it,” she wondered.

Twenty-two-year-old Zaeré Godley, who found her struggling to get from one class to the next on her first week, befriended Hedrick. “I would have had a lot more difficulty without Zaeré,” Hedrick said. The two have shared classes and become close friends.

She has stayed upbeat and positive during her time at BCCC. “I try to have a lot of fun in a seated class. When I see a student struggling, I see what I can do to make that person happier.”

Compared to carefree youth, she feels much more focused on college. “I didn’t care back then. I didn’t think I needed it. I thought I was going to leave the state anyway.”

She thinks she would have performed poorly had she attended then. Now, she is part of Gamma Beta Phi at BCCC, the honor society. Ingalls nominated her for a “Hard Worker” Best of BCCC award. She even works at the college in a work-study position in Continuing Education.

Between saving abused dogs and making people smile across campus, Hedrick has taken her life and her pain and used it to brighten the world. Next spring she will complete a 50-year journey and follow in the footsteps of her daughter.