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When Freda Hoffman
was a teenager, she wondered what it would be like to design
buildings and churches.
“But I guess at the time it seemed like the impossible dream.”
Now, the 40-year-old physician’s assistant wants to make
becoming an architect her “dream come true,” and believes that
enrolling in college for the first time a few years ago was the
very first step along that journey.
“It’s been great coming to school here,” says Hoffman. “I love
the professors and the smaller classes, and I like getting to
know the other students in class. It’s fun for me.”
Hoffman admits that she doesn’t have high school memories to
compare her college experience to, as the Washington, Georgia,
native was home schooled from seventh grade on.
Still, the oldest of four found that home schooling had definite
advantages, and she became an independent and motivated learner
early on.
“I learned how to teach myself a lot of what I needed to know. I
had time to run a small cake-decorating business out of my home
and did some custom sewing,” she recalls. “When my parents moved
to Chatsworth I helped them build their house, and later on I
went to work for a florist. I also worked at a department store
before I started working at North Georgia Radiology.” |
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About a dozen years ago,
Hoffman was recruited by the late Dr. Bill Gregory to become a
Patient Care Coordinator first at Cross Plains Medical Center
and then at Cornerstone Medical. She also accompanied him when
he opened his solo practice in 1999.
“I loved where I worked and who I worked for, the whole
atmosphere,” she says. “Dr. Gregory was really good about making
you believe you could do anything. He told me the whole time I
worked for him that I should go to college. At the time, I just
didn’t have the confidence to do it.”
Following Dr. Gregory’s memorial service in June of 2006,
Hoffman knew that the time had come to take that first step.
“I decided that day that I would find out what I needed to do to
enroll in college. I know that that would have made him so
proud.”
Hoffman discovered that she needed to pass the General
Educational Development (GED) tests to be accepted to Dalton
State. After about a month of review, she took and passed the
tests, and enrolled in the College’s General Studies program in
the fall of 2006.
Since then, she has maintained a perfect 4.0 grade point
average, and has taken a few night classes each semester while
assisting Dr. Monica Verma during the day at Northwest Georgia
Hematology and Oncology Center.
“I try to study as much as I can, a little bit each day and a
lot on the weekends,” says Hoffman, who in her spare time enjoys
reading, cooking, gardening, and traveling.
Over the past few years she has volunteered for a medical
mission trip to Peru with the First Methodist Church and has
sung on a choir tour with First Baptist Church.
“Our choir went on tour in Europe in 2005, and we spent two
weeks in the Czech Republic, Austria, and Switzerland. I really
enjoyed going to the Opera while we were there. I’d like to do a
lot more traveling in the future.”
Once she finishes her associate degree at Dalton State, which
should take about two more years, Hoffman plans to attend
Georgia Tech and complete her degree in architecture.
“I think it would be really neat to design church buildings. But
I’m also very interested in urban planning. I might want to work
in a third-world country one day and use those architectural
skills to make people’s lives better.”
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