At a different time, Adrien Cuellar-McGuire might have gone into the family business following college graduation. But by the time she finished college, her family had already sold its popular chain of El Chico restaurants, so her career horizons were wide open.

“My mom and dad were always big on me going to college,” she says. “They were 100 percent supporters of education and of what I did. My dad, Frank Cuellar Jr., was a member of the DCCCD Foundation Board of Directors in the 1970s.”

Now a humanities professor at Brookhaven College, Adrien began her own college education in the Dallas County Community College District — taking courses at Brookhaven, North Lake and Richland colleges before transferring to SMU to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history.

“Why do I teach? I really like school,” she says with a laugh. “I graduated from high school early because I wanted to learn more — they didn’t have dual credit enrollment then, but I got permission to take college classes because I wanted to get on with my education.

“What was great about community college was my relationships with my professors,” she says. “Rachel McClung, my art professor at North Lake, was actually partly responsible for me getting into teaching. When I graduated from SMU in the spring of 1993, she called and asked me what I was going to do. I had put my résumé out, but nothing had materialized. She invited me to teach part-time at North Lake — which I did for four years. Then, a full-time position opened in the Humanities Division at Brookhaven, and I never looked back.”

Community college also opened Adrien’s eyes to international study and travel when she participated in North Lake’s Rome semester abroad and in Brookhaven’s British Literature study course to the United Kingdom. “Those experiences opened my eyes to study abroad at a price I could afford,” she says. Now, though, she’s the educator abroad, participating as a presenter and roundtable member of an interdisciplinary group of educators studying human migration issues at Oxford University in August 2008.

“Education is my passion — I want to never stop learning,” she says. “I learned from my mentors to keep teaching fresh by continually asking questions: What can we do next in the classroom? What can we change so that we can keep up with what’s new?

“I think there are greater opportunities developing friendships with your professors in the community college setting than at the university level,” she says. “I want my students to feel how I felt with my professors there, that they’re not just a number.

“My DCCCD professors took a real interest in me, and I hope that I do that for my students as well. I really care about their futures.”

For Adrien Cuellar-McGuire, it all began here.