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Success StoriesOutstanding Student Scholar Award winner encourages women
Once homeless, MHCC Outstanding Student Scholar
“The OCCA award tells me that with hope, support and a lot of hard work, I can make anything happen,” Mertes said. Unfortunately, this dramatic turnaround in her life wasn’t easily achieved. Homeless, drug addicted and a domestic abuse victim, it seemed as if life couldn’t get much worse, but it did. Mertes was arrested after a high speed police chase. The judge who presided over her case believed in her sincerity to get off of drugs but had to sentence her to jail until treatment program space became available. After three months in jail she was accepted into a drug treatment program. “Once I was clean and sober I found a job so I could pay off my court costs and fines,” Mertes said. “After I’d made full restitution, I wanted to make a clean start. I knew I needed a whole new environment and network of friends if I was going to do something with my life.” After giving it serious thought, Mertes entered the Transitions program at MHCC, a program designed to help displaced homemakers and single parents transition to college. “When I first started at MHCC, my self-esteem was so low, I wanted a solitary career, one that wouldn’t require me to deal with people,” Mertes said. Mertes describes her journey as a series of “baby steps,” and the first one was learning to trust others and accept their support. “Once I’d learned to trust others, I began a journey toward self respect which is rapidly developing into a crusade,” Mertes said. “My past experiences give me an ability to help others through my insight and compassion. The flip side of that is in helping others who suffer from addiction and domestic violence, I have found a way to give value to my past experiences.” Through the Mental Health/Human Service program Mertes learned the skills to help others, skills she has used as a mentor in the Transitions program and at her internship at Cascadia Behavioral Health Care. The OCCA recognition also comes with a $1000 scholarship which she will use when she transfers to Portland State University to major in Child and Family Studies. After that, she plans to pursue a master’s degree in Social Services. “I simply can’t imagine my life without the Transitions and the Mental Health/Human Service instructors,” Mertes said. “I came to MHCC as a struggling student and will be leaving as a Mental Health professional.” How one woman has changed her life through college
Felecia Wells-Thomas decided she needed a drastic career change. “I always told my son he could be whatever he wanted to be,” she said. “But I needed to show him myself, and I was bored with my job.” While she was researching elementary schools for him, now 12, she realized she needed to find a school for herself as well. Her search led her to Mt. Hood Community College. A few years later, not only does she have her associate’s degree in Hospitality and Tourism, but she’s about to graduate with her Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. But Wells-Thomas wouldn’t have gotten this far without the skills she learned at MHCC. “I didn’t have the tools to succeed in a four-year learning environment,” she said. “But MHCC taught me to be confident and to sit in the front row.” “Transitions is a core group of women who were learning to focus on themselves and learning to speak openly,” she said. “I learned how to stand out and to ask for what I want and what I need.” Wells-Thomas needed help focusing her many interests into a career path. Thanks to guidance from her Transitions coursework, she decided to earn her associate’s degree in Hospitality and Tourism because it was a way to integrate her interests in history, people and culture. Switching from full-time beautician to full-time student was a difficult adjustment for Wells-Thomas. MHCC’s classroom format helped her ease her academic insecurities. “The classes are small,” she said. “Instead of lectures, we had to interact with our classmates and the instructor. I felt like I could ask for help because of the partnership with my instructors.” Succeeding academically at MHCC prepared Wells-Thomas for continuing her education. This year, she’ll graduate from Portland State University with a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration. Wells-Thomas selected her major at PSU with similar criteria as her major at MHCC; she wanted a degree that covered a wide-variety of subjects. She liked how business administration incorporated research, forecasting and logistics. Her post-graduation hopes are to get involved with a developing company that’s interested in sustainability. And she’s still a very involved parent to her son. “I try to expose him to culture,” she said. “I try to teach him about having good friends and being a good friend. And he’s so proud of me.” A student’s tragedy changes the life of the one person who offers help
Blanshine was deeply affected by this event. “Seeing the way he was treated because of the lack of language, I knew I could help people so much better than that!” She understood the difficulty of not speaking English because she struggled to learn English herself. She was born the youngest of 12 children to parents who could not read or write. She was able to finish tenth grade in her tiny village in Mexico, before having to drop out. Her father believed school was not for women—Blanshine looked at her narrow world and felt dissatisfaction and frustration. When her sister moved to the United States, she jumped at the opportunity for a new life. In Oregon, she enrolled in English classes at Mt. Hood Community College. She later earned her GED and went on to obtain an Educational Assistant certificate. After her student’s accident, Blanshine decided to take her bilingual skills to the nursing field to ensure Spanish speakers received the level of healthcare enjoyed by English speakers. Blanshine enrolled in the Health Care Access Program (HCAP), a nationally recognized MHCC program that helps non-native English speaking women prepare to enter a health care program. Through HCAP she’s received resources and support, attended workshops and has even observed open-heart surgery. She will receive her Associate of Arts Oregon Transfer degree in June and is applying to enter a nursing program. Recently she was awarded the Soroptimist scholarship, her sixth scholarship to date. |
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Four years ago no one would believe Julie Mertes would one day be shaking hands with the governor or chosen as an outstanding community college scholar. That’s because four years ago Mertes was eating green beans in a vacant lot at Christmas. She was homeless and desperately wanted to shake her drug addiction but had no idea where to start. Today, Mertes is drug-free, has a job and will soon receive a Mental Health/Human Service degree from Mt. Hood Community College with a 4.0 G.P.A. 
When a drunk driver hit one of her students, Teresa Blanshine’s life took a new direction. The student was in a coma for a month and his only relative in the country didn’t speak English. According to Blanshine, the hospital had him sign documents he couldn’t read and then forced the boy to leave the hospital before he was ready. When Blanshine, an instructional assistant, heard what happened, she was not only horrified, she arranged for the boy to enter a rehabilitation home, helped his parents travel to Oregon from Mexico and got them a lawyer.