Press Release:
Zofia Cheeseman traded twenty hours a week in the gym for service to others at Beaufort County Community College, where she is finishing two associate degrees and preparing to transfer as a junior.
WASHINGTON, N.C. For most of her life, Zofia Cheeseman built her life and schedule around being a gymnast until a health scare forced her to look at her life off the mat. A dual-enrolled student at Beaufort County Community College and Beaufort County Early College High School and a successful math tutor, she is finishing two associate degrees and weighing acceptances from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Cheeseman had trained twenty hours a week from an early age, competing at a high level and organizing her life around the sport. At practice one afternoon during her freshman year, she could not catch her breath.
"I just couldn't breathe in my chest, and it was so odd because you know it's heavy, so you're thinking, whatever, I'm just working out," she said.
"But then I just couldn't."
At the hospital, doctors diagnosed her with myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. After a month of complete rest, she returned to the gym, but the sport's demands no longer felt safe. She stopped competing for good.
"I had to do what's best for me," she said.
"I was like, am I leaving these people behind by picking myself first, but I had to do what's best for me."
The harder question came next. Twenty hours a week had simply vanished, and with them, the identity she had built around them.
"When people would ask you, who are you? I was like, I'm Zofia, I'm a gymnast. That's who I am," she said.
"But then you have to change it. Like, who am I? And that was part of that big self-discovery."
Cheeseman found part of her answer at Beaufort CCC.
She threw herself into campus life in a way she might not have otherwise. She became a college ambassador, joined the Student Government Association, and started volunteering through Gamma Beta Phi, the college's honor society. Courses in macroeconomics, microeconomics, and personal finance opened doors she did not know existed, pointing her toward a major in mathematics and economics and a career interest in investment banking and quantitative trading.
"I took macroeconomics and micro, and then also my personal finance class, and it's just something that I enjoyed more than any other subject," she said.
She also spent her sophomore year tutoring seventh and eighth graders at Chocowinity Middle School, eight to eleven hours a week, working to make math feel worth caring about. By the end of the year, the school's math scores had grown by ten percent.
"Seeing that number, I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing," Cheeseman said.
None of it was the original plan. It was what happened when she had to figure out who else she could be.
"When you cut that out," she said of the twenty hours a week,
"it's like, what do you do with your life?"
Her degrees from the college will help her quickly get her bachelor's degree. Wherever she lands, she will arrive as a junior, preparing a shorter university run for a potential graduate degree.
At Beaufort CCC, she found room to ask the hard questions and space to answer them. The gymnast is still there, she visits the gym when she can, but she is no longer the whole story.
"Let me just rededicate to what I can to do good for others," Cheeseman said,
"and just also explore myself."
- Attila Nemecz
- Marketing and Public Relations Coordinator
- Beaufort County Community College
- 5337 U.S. Highway 264 East
- Washington, N.C. 27889
- Ph: 252-940-6387
- Cell: 252-940-8672
- attila.nemecz@beaufortccc.edu
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