FARMINGTON – When Misty Marston, pregnant with her first child, dropped out of Rumford’s Mountain Valley High School in 1997, she thought college was never going to happen. So the idea that less than a decade later she would speak on behalf of her university to 250 people at a conference in Washington was not even a blip on her radar screen.

Despite hardships that come with being a young mother, going through a divorce and becoming a single mother of two, Marston managed to get her high school equivalency diploma and is on the verge of getting her bachelor’s degree in rehabilitation services at the University of Maine Farmington. She is already planning on graduate school.

Rehabilitation specialists, she explained, work with people with “differing abilities,” a term she used to describe those with, what most would consider, disabilities. There are several areas of rehabilitation services including addiction, mental health and recreation. Marston said she plans to work in the mental health arena and will do an internship next semester, her last, at Tri-County Mental Health in Farmington.

In October, Marston had what she termed an “amazing experience” when she was asked to participate on a panel of rehabilitation specialists at a nationwide conference in Washington. She was the only undergraduate to sit on the panel of four.

She said people at the conference were welcoming, inclusive and supportive. She had been intimidated by the prospect of meeting people with master’s and doctoral degrees. But once there, her fears just “melted away,” she said.

“There was no us and them,” she said. “They were there to guide us.”

Marston’s professor, Karen Barrett, told her there would be about 25 people in the audience who would ask questions about where the field was going and how they could better distinguish it.

But when Marston, Barrett and fellow students arrived at the venue, it became apparent that Barrett had made an error. Not 25 but about 250 people were in the room. Marston’s cohorts quickly spread themselves throughout the audience to provide her with a familiar face regardless which direction she looked.

She was nervous, she said. She knew she was representing her university and wanted to impress. Her palms were sweaty, her voice shaky and she stumbled over her words, she said.

“I don’t even know what I said for the first two questions,” she said. But by the third, her nerves had calmed.

“I think Dr. Barrett was more nervous than I was,” she said, laughing.

She was happy when her panel appearance was over – elated with a deep sense of accomplishment, she said.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the philosophy and supportive environment,” she said.