Sacramento State student Katherrine Healey, a recipient of the California State University’s 2010 Trustees Award for Outstanding Achievement, manages to juggle double roles as a high-achieving student and a responsible daughter to an ailing mother.

The Board of Trustees gives the award to one student from each CSU campus. According to the CSU website, the award is given to students in need of financial aid, have overcome challenges, have demonstrated outstanding academic success and are actively involved in their community.

Healey, a senior history and deaf studies major, has a 4.0 grade point average. She is also a member of the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, editor in chief of the history department’s journal and works as an English tutor on campus.

“She really seems to be taking advantage of all the things a university can offer you, not only one path, but access to so many different kinds of people and programs, and I just feel like she’s a really good representative of what a university student can be,” said history professor Erika Gasser, who has worked with Healey in the honor society.

Healey said her mother’s health has made juggling work and school more complicated.

Last year, her mother was nearing a diabetic coma, passing out and eventually had to stop driving because she was unable to stay awake for long periods of time. She also endured a gastric bypass surgery, and the doctor had told her if she did not have the surgery, he was not sure if she would live another five years, Healey said.

With all of her different tasks to manage, Healey finds her own way of handling everything by always making a list of what she has to do.

“And I have the “If I get nothing else done today I must …’ and try to tackle that,” she said.

When Healey first came to Sac State, her major was history and she had planned on becoming a history teacher. But now, with a double major, she plans on returning to Sac State after graduation to get her master’s degree to become a professor.

Healey said people always ask her if she chose deaf studies because she has a deaf family member, but that is not the case.

She was introduced to sign language because of a project she was assigned in her senior year of high school. She said she wanted to focus on performing arts and theater-related subjects for her project, but her teacher pushed her to do something more challenging.

“So to kind of be a smart-aleck I was like, “I’ll do the opposite of music; I’ll do sign language.’ And that’s where it all started,” Healey said.

Once she started at Sac State, she continued taking sign language courses, even though she had already met her foreign language requirement in high school.

“The history’s easy because there’s lots of history to take but deaf studies is kind of unusual,” said history professor Aaron Cohen, who has known Healey for about five years and has taught a few of her classes.

Healey said she is interested not just in sign language, but also in the cultural and historical aspects of the deaf community.

“People are just now recently looking at the deaf community as not just a disabled group but a cultural minority and that was very interesting to me because we have a lot of stereotypes and preconceptions about the deaf community,” Healey said. “I got really interested in it, and because I had some training as a history student I wanted to apply what I was learning there to this deaf cultural group.”

Healey said her mother, who has been her inspiration, thinks she is crazy for taking on so many responsibilities.

“She always says with all the activities I’m doing I should cut about three of them in order to keep my sanity,” Healey said. “But I think you just gotta do what you love and it helps you with all the difficult things that you also have to juggle.”

When Healey was young, she watched her single mother attend graduate school at night and work as a teacher during the day.

“But I remember going to her graduation ceremony,” she said. “It ended up being worth it.”

After Healey graduates this fall, she said she plans to go on a month-long trip around Europe with her best friend.

This previous summer, Healey spent two weeks in Paris studying French sign language. She also spent three weeks in Italy studying Italian sign language.

She said she now wants to share her experience with a friend, whose parents are deaf. It would be fun to show her the “deaf side of Europe,” she said.

Even though Healey will soon be graduating, it will be hard for some to forget her.

“I’m just very sad that she will eventually be graduating,” Gasser said. “I want her to stay forever.”

Cayla Gales can be reached at [email protected].