When recent graduate Adriana Barragan reflects on her time as a student, “I think about myself and how much I’ve grown being here.”

Barragan, a native of Michoacan, Mexico, came to the U.S. when she was almost 16 and completed her last three years of high school at Dalton High.

She enrolled at Dalton State, intending to study the universal language of computers, but ended up with a Bachelor of Science in Education degree.

“This fall, I will teach first grade at Pleasant Grove Elementary,” Barragan says, noting that she student taught first and fifth grades at that school this past year.

 “I was a teaching assistant and was lucky to work for one of the best teachers I’ve ever known. She has taught for a long time and was a good role model for me. I would like to be like her one day.”

Barragan says she is excited about having her own first grade classroom because she likes the idea of being able to teach a wide range of subjects to her students.

”When you get your kids at the beginning of the year, you want to teach them everything, because they’re your kids,” she says. “I look forward to teaching them math, reading and writing, and even sports. There are so many creative ways to teach those subjects.”

“They really prepare you well here,” she says. “They make you work hard, so that when you go into the classroom, you know what you’re doing.”

One of the challenges she faced when she moved to the states was learning the language, but she vowed never to let the language barrier stop her from doing what she wanted to do.

“Sometimes that has been difficult. For example, I have discovered that many of the sounds that we teach children in phonics are sounds that we do not recognize in Spanish. So I’ve had to learn those.”

Barragan does not expect that her educational journey will end with a bachelor’s degree. She intends to begin pursuing her master’s in education after she completes her first year in the classroom.

And because she’s always had an interest in psychology, she is considering studying child psychology in the future, perhaps with the goal of being a school counselor.

“I’ve been studying for so long that I hope to be able to travel more in the next few years,” she says.

Barragan feels that whatever her educational future holds, she has received a very firm foundation at Dalton State.

“Some of our class went to a conference in Atlanta and met with other future teachers. We could tell from what they were saying that our instructors had prepared us better for the certification test than they were. We also graduate with an ESOL endorsement and technology training, which some programs don’t offer. I think we will do very well in our classrooms.”