Fighting challenges, raising a child, keeping GPA high

Despite being hard of hearing, Mt. Hood student Candace Woods managed to maintain a 4.0 GPA while also being responsible for raising her one-year-old son, Keelen.

Woods has been attending Mt. Hood to be a licensed practical nurse. She originally thought she wanted to teach sign language, but changed her mind after taking Myers-Briggs style (occupational match) tests. “It gave me a better idea of what I really wanted to do, and the Transitions program also gave me confidence, since I struggled all my life,” she said.

She started at Mt. Hood through the Transitions program last year. Woods got accepted into the program after going to an informational meeting.

“I was 23 when I started college. I didn’t think I was going to get accepted into the (Transitions) program, but I did and that was really exciting. It’s a really amazing experience,” she said.

“I got to know a lot of women of all kinds of different traits and pasts and different hardships. It made me realize that I was not the only one that was suffering some sort of hardship, or disability, or maybe even a bad background.”

Having a hearing disability posed real challenges for Woods.

“The first week of spring term, my writing teacher – he was a really cool teacher – he just talked way too fast and I never thought that would ever be a problem, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying,” she said.

Woods attempted different methods to get the most out of her class lectures, without much success. At first, she had a voice recorder, and then she had fellow students take notes for her. “The note takers – I had two of them, one of them would be there, sometimes they both wouldn’t be there – so I just felt like a pain in the butt by trying to take another note taker before class started,” she said, explaining her difficulties.

“I switched writing teachers, too, to see if that would work, but it wasn’t really working out. I don’t know why, he just seemed to be really quiet,” Woods said. “It just seemed like, ‘If it’s happening with two teachers, then it’s my problem, not theirs,’ ” she said. “That’s when I decided to get my hearing aids.”

Eventually, Woods dropped all of her classes so she could focus on getting her hearing aids.

“I got a letter in the mail saying that I have been accepted for the medical ‘Obamacare’ and I realized, ‘I’m just having a really difficult time, so I think that I need to drop spring term and focus on my hearing,’ ” she said.

Woods has been hearing-disabled from a really young age. “They (her doctors) think it’s from the fever when I got pneumonia when I was 2, and I just had such a high fever that it burned the hairs off of my eardrums,” she said. “They do think there is a slight chance that I could have been born with this, but for the most part they think it’s from that fever.”

“Obamacare” benefits have helped Woods with her hearing aids. “I’m just so excited — I’ll be able to hear my son talk more, I can hear the gravel move beneath my feet, and the rain hit the roof — I can’t hear that, but everybody else can (until now),” she said.

Woods enjoys the company of Keelen. “My son, he’s the best thing that’s ever happened in my life. He’s the whole reason I’m in school. He loves to go to school, and he knows I go to school,” she said.

“He just loves to help out with everything — he’s such a helper, he wants to sweep the floor, and he’ll try to do my homework with me, too.”

Woods is involved with the AVID program at Mt. Hood. She plans to retake the classes she dropped and eventually get her certified nursing assistant credentials so that she could pursue the path for becoming a licensed practical nurse.