Community is important to Carly Richards '29.

It's why she raises chickens in her backyard and distributes their eggs to neighborhood families in need on a weekly basis. It’s why she persuaded her high school biology teacher to turn the creek running through her hometown of Madison, N.C., into a classroom to test for microorganisms and pH levels. Eventually the class rented an industrial container to haul off the garbage Carly and her classmates fished out of the creek.

“I love giving back,” she says. “Community service is a big part of who I am. There’s something about being part of something bigger than me that needs me as much as I need it.”

Carly's community is about to grow even bigger when she enrolls at Guilford College in the fall. She’ll major in Chemistry and, after her junior year, she hopes to enroll dually at Elon University Law School and Guilford. The partnership between the two schools provides motivated, talented students like Carly the opportunity to save time and money by starting law school at Elon after their junior year at Guilford.

Carly wants to use her degrees in Chemistry and Law to become a patent attorney to help chemists create patents for their work and protect their inventions. “I love to help people and being able to help these inventors and protect their ideas and inventions is so important to me,” she says.

Picking the right college was important too, says Carly. Her mother, Nicole Richards ’98, attended Guilford. “She’s been telling me about Guilford since I was in middle school – maybe even earlier – and it sounded so wonderful, almost too wonderful to be true.”

Turns out Mom knows best. Carly toured the school last fall and knew she’d found her home the next four years. “The diversity and small-town feel is real,” she says. “But there’s nothing small about the education. The faculty is awesome. The clubs and opportunities are like you’d find at a big schoolCarly Richards is bringing her love of community to a school that's equally .”