College is supposed to be hard. That’s the bargain students like Alba Argueta Garcia ’26 accept. The late nights, the deadlines that stack like bricks, the nervous ritual of defending a thesis as if your ricocheting ideas are something that can be pinned down and judged.

But for Alba, those things never quite qualified as difficult.

Harder still is leaving family behind in Honduras for an opportunity at something more in the United States. Even harder is sitting in a kindergarten classroom in Winston-Salem as a teacher explains the alphabet to classmates and not having the language to keep up.

These days it’s the rest of the world trying to keep up with Alba. On Saturday she will walk across a stage under Guilford College’s leafy quad for Commencement. When she steps off the other side, she will carry with her a bachelor’s degree with three majors – Education, Business Administration and Accounting before wrapping up her MBA in August.

You read that right: A bachelor’s degree with three majors and an MBA on the way. One student, barely 22. It is an academic haul that sounds less like a plan and more like a dare. Alba just shrugs at it all.

“I just kept adding to my plate,” she says, talking about course work the way others might talk about a trip to Golden Corral.

Except nothing about Alba’s story is accidental, nothing about it is solitary.

Her father fled Honduras before she could walk. Jobs were scarce in Honduras, and Junior Argueta wanted something larger than survival. He wanted work and opportunity – not just for himself, but his daughter. Alba and her mother, Geldy Garcia, followed a year later, when she was 2, leaving behind not just a place but a whole architecture of belonging – family, familiarity, the version of life they knew. What they built in Winston-Salem was quieter, less visible, but no less deliberate.

Today, Argueta works as a mechanic, a career built through long days, risk and steady labor.

Alba says her father works more than he has to. Not because anyone demands it, but because he measures responsibility differently. Mom fills in the spaces – care, attention, the daily proof that love is not theoretical. Alba absorbed it all.

“You can give 80 percent and be fine,” she says. “But my parents give 100 percent all the time. Probably a little more.”

Alba’s mother says there is a particular American irony in stories like her daughter's: a nation that praises grit often makes the grittiest people prove themselves twice.

“My daughter’s always been so smart and determined,” Geldy Garcia said. “She had to be to find her path to college. No matter what obstacles came along she had to be determined.”

Meet more members of Guilford's Class of 2026

Before she ever learned to calculate anything in a classroom, Alba understood the equation. Immigrants like Alba make up a critical and growing segment of college students, comprising 34 percent of total enrollment, according to data from the Institute of Higher Education Policy.

But the institute noted disproportionate levels of poverty, difficulty navigating the country’s complex financial aid system, systemic racism and K-12 funding disparities, can leave college just out of many immigrant students’ reach.

Reality only cemented Alba’s resolve. “So many people in my life gave it their all for me,” she says. “Why wouldn’t I do the same. Really, that’s the only way I know how to do things is give 100 percent.”

She arrived at Guilford with an associate’s degree after four years at the Early College of Forsyth County, a head start in college credits that afforded her the opportunity to thrive at Guilford. Initially, she planned to study Education. It made sense. She loves working with children. “It feels less like work and more like something closer to joy when I’m around them,” she says.

Then came the suggestion from a college counselor that she had room for another major.

So she added Business Administration.

Later Accounting, because the courses overlapped, because it was logical, because she could. And then, almost inevitably, came the conversation that tipped the whole thing into something else.

Before the start of her senior year, a Business professor approached her with an idea: If she were interested, she could squeeze in an MBA. He warned her it would be a full load – even bigger than fuller – but she could do it.

Alba thought about it, measured it against everything she already learned about effort, and said yes.

Yes to 20-credit hour semesters. Yes. to graduate courses stacked on top of her remaining undergraduate requirements. It meant long days that bled into longer nights, the kind of schedule that doesn’t leave much room for error or hesitation.

Has she ever felt overwhelmed by everything?

“Sometimes maybe a little,” she says. “But never where it reached a stopping point. I just adjusted and kept moving forward.”

She smiles.”That’s something my mom and dad taught me and they were good teachers.”

And she understands, perhaps better than many students, that achievement rarely belongs to one person alone. Nowhere will that be more obvious than on Saturday morning at Guilford.

Her name will be called, and somewhere in the crowd, there will be movement. Friends, family, church members – more than 25 people by Alba’s latest count. There will be cameras raised and maracas lifted in celebration. There will be noise, unmistakable and unapologetic.

“I imagine there’s going to be a lot of applause and shouting,” says Alba. “Maybe even some crying. A lot of people who are coming have known me for years and been part of this journey. I love that they want to be here for the end.”

Except it’s not really the end. Not even close.

She is weighing what comes next – another master’s degree, perhaps in Accounting, perhaps in Divinity, at Wake Forest University.

For now, though, the moment is this one.

Someone asked Alba what she would tell a younger student in a new country struggling to learn a new language. Someone standing at the beginning of a path that feels uncertain. She doesn’t reach for anything complicated.

“A lot of us underestimate our potential,” she said. “If someone else can do it, we can too.”

She wants other students to hear her story. And not just hear it, but repeat it. Just the thought of this makes Alba smile. “Maybe if one student learns my story,” she says. “And if that student’s story is heard by others, wouldn’t that be something?”