Sheila McCoy made a deal with her youngest daughter, Brooke, who had just graduated from a four-year university. It was 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic, and Brooke’s job prospects suddenly seemed few and far between.  

“We made a deal, since she didn’t have employment options that she’d go for her master’s degree, if I’d go for my associate’s degree,” said McCoy.

It was a deal worth making for both of them. This past December, Brooke finished her degree while her mom was recently named among the best community college students in the Pennsylvania and is on track to graduate in May.

McCoy, 52, of Lansdale, a culinary arts major at The Culinary Arts Institute at Montgomery County Community College, has been selected to the 2021-2022 All-Pennsylvania Academic Team as a workforce pathway scholar. Workforce students must have a minimum of 12 college-level credit hours at a community college and a cumulative GPA of 3.5 or higher. The program is sponsored by Phi Theta Kappa (PTK), the international honor society for two-year colleges, and The Pennsylvania Commission for Community Colleges.

Further, McCoy has been nominated to the All-USA Academic Team as a workforce pathway scholar. The award recognizes high achieving college students, who demonstrate academic excellence and intellectual rigor combined with leadership and service that extends their education beyond the classroom to benefit society. The program is sponsored by Cengage with additional support provided by the American Association of Community Colleges and PTK.

“I’m overwhelmed,” said McCoy on the award and the nomination. She is the first in her family among her generation or older to go to college. “I didn’t know why I would be chosen. I just do my work. I don’t do anything amazing. It’s an absolute honor.”

In 1987, at just 17 years old, McCoy emigrated from County Wexford, Ireland, a rural coastal town along the southeastern portion of the country, to the United States and settled with friends in Abington.

“I finished school pretty young,” she said. “I wanted to go to college. Ireland had a bad recession at the time. My dad said ‘no, you can’t go to college. You have to go out and earn your keep in the world.’ So, I decided to come here. I moved to America and worked the usual jobs as a nanny and a housekeeper.”

She met her husband, Leslie, who goes by Skip, in the laundry room of her apartment building. They talked for five hours as he was painting a sign to sell Christmas trees for extra money, and she was doing her laundry. They hit it off and were soon married and now have three daughters together, Ciara, Shania, Brooke. She’s now also a grandmother to 2-year-old Mikayla.

The couple moved to Lansdale in 2000 where they opened a party rental company together. Six years later she suffered a major stroke, which temporarily removed her short-term memory. It couldn’t have come at a worse time, as she had signed a contract to open her first community pool snack bar a week before the stroke.

“It was really bad timing,” she said. Yet somehow she made it work, opening the business two months after the incident. “The snack bars were run more like quick food service, as opposed to a snack bar.”

Around that same time, McCoy became an American citizen and went on to open four additional snack bars at community pools. From there, she opened a café at a local, two-year college and was enjoying her successful business ventures until the pandemic hit two years ago.

The café was closed indefinitely. She closed one of her snack bars. Then her daughter graduated from college and McCoy made the deal to go back to school. She chose MCCC because of its reputation for quality instruction and because it was close to home.

“I started the culinary program and have absolutely loved it. The level that comes out of The Culinary Arts Institute is very good. The chefs are amazing. They’re tough but they’re good,” she said, though she said she got off to a bit of a rough start. “The week before I was to be in the kitchen with Chef Stephen Latona for the first time, I amputated the top of my finger with a lawnmower. Trying to do knife skills with an amputated finger was a lot of fun. He was good. I was afraid he was going to say go back and try again in a couple of years when that’s fixed. But he didn’t. He let me keep going and I did it.”

“Sheila McCoy from the outset has been an exceptional student. She expressed her worries of going back to school, but nothing stopped her from succeeding in class,” said Latona. “She did everything in the kitchen classes, be it homework assignments, knife skills tests, and crafting great food, with the utmost care and dedication to very high standards. She always asked if she could help out and mentored the younger students when she saw them struggling. I truly enjoyed teaching her in my kitchen labs.”

During her time in the program, McCoy obtained two internships. The first was a year ago at Small Batch Kitchen in 2021 where she prepared preordered meals for pickup.

“Since with COVID-19, they only permitted one person in the kitchen at a time, I would have to do all aspects of meal myself. I had to make sure it was properly packaged,” she said. “It was a really cool experience.”

Last fall, she interned as a prep cook at St. Mary Manor Assisted Living in Lansdale, preparing and plating breakfast and lunch.

“Both internships were something a little off the wall,” she said. “I could have gone to restaurant and worked as part of a huge team, but I didn’t feel like there would be anything completely different about it. I wanted something unique. I was happy with both.”

With graduation around the corner, McCoy said she wants to launch her own restaurant. CAI’s graduation requirements include creating a business plan to open a restaurant. She will use that plan to help her open her place, which will be called “The Hearth” in a couple years.  

Going back to school at a later stage in life was intimidating at first, she said, but it ended up being one of the best decisions she’s ever made, she said.

“My café was closed. It was perfect. I just got lucky,” said McCoy. “I’m the one person in the world COVID-19 worked out for. There was no way I was ever going to go to college. If I’m working full-time, I’m not going to look at a book, there’s no time. This was perfect. I’m a little bit late but better late than never.”

Pennsylvania’s community colleges collaborate with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education universities to provide scholarships to All-PA Transfer Team members at PASSHE institutions, providing two years of tuition at any PASSHE school.