This young lady seems to have the right idea about her future. She is going to college and never even mentions the "Pioneer" word in her interview! My congrats to her!
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http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Items/03NewsHEAD07100905.htm Mandy Hibbert, Stetson University
By MARK HARPER Education Writer
Last update: October 09, 2005
DELAND -- Mandy Hibbert of Miami applied to eight universities. She visited three.
At one, Lorna Fisher, her uptight mom -- whose demeanor is opposite of her easygoing daughter -- said: "I have a bad feeling. I'm sorry. You're not coming here."
Then came Stetson University.
Fisher, who had quizzed a few of the women on campus, agreed. So on Aug. 20, a daughter who called her mother "Fish" and "my strength" and a mother who called her daughter "Amanda" and "my right-hand person" parted ways.
"Normally parents have jitters," Fisher said. "I had no remorse."
Hibbert, 18, is a lot of things. She is a college freshman at Stetson, 4 1/2 hours from her Miami home, who's majoring in biology and was salutatorian at her high school, Fort Lauderdale Prep School. She is a social person with friends who nevertheless told her mom on the phone recently: "I am alone up here." She is a black Jehovah's Witness on a campus comprising mostly white Christians.
But mostly she's a mother's first-born daughter.
What does she want to do?
She wants to go to medical school and maybe be a surgeon, but tells a story about going to bring-your-daughter-to-work days, and seeing the offices where her mother toiled as a medical office assistant, and later as a nurse.
"I always looked up to her," Hibbert said.
On Friday, she was boarding a Greyhound bus, heading for home for fall break. She was excited to see her sister, brother and stepdad for the first time in 48 days. But mostly, she was excited to see her beloved Fish.