OXFORD, ENGLAND—Boe knows 18-wheelers. Boe knows organic vegetables. And by the end of the summer, Boe will know Twelfth Night, short fiction and the intricacies of international law.

Among 60-some-odd American college students studying at Trinity College in Oxford this summer, Barbara “Boe” Morgan is going to classes and learning the customs like everyone else. But sit down to afternoon tea with her and she’ll tell you about growing up with seven brothers and sisters, living in an organic gardening commune in southern New Hampshire and driving for decades on the interstates of America.

With a little prodding, she might even mention her leading role in the Brattleboro Ballet School’s spring show.

After hearing all Boe’s extraordinary stories, her present situation seems incongruously tame: she’s in the midst of her sophomore year at Smith College. Unlike those of us for whom college was the unquestionable post-high school destination, Boe has diverted from the established path a hundred times in life. Coming to Oxford to study Shakespeare, fiction writing and international law is another route she might never have expected to take.

After high school, one of her first jobs was in a mail-order company where women made $3 an hour for working the line. Boe decided to load mail trucks with the guys for a 50-cent raise in pay. At 21, she was driving a meat truck around the North Shore, braving slaughterhouses and blood-covered butchers to haul crates of beef. Not long after, she was driving 18-wheelers. All jobs that relatively few Smith students have on their college resumes.

She spent seven years driving a route to Cape Cod, chilling with the locals and going to the beach. “I could have driven that route for the rest of my life,” she recalls. But when she was reassigned, her focus shifted just a bit. Inspired by nieces and nephews who were Internet savvy, she enrolled in a computer course at a local community college. One course became four—besides computer basics, she enrolled in Political Science, English 101 and a history class on Critical Issues of the Holocaust.

And something struck home. “I discovered the intellectual chemistry that happens in a classroom. It was like I got a sip of water and didn’t even know I was thirsty.”

It wasn’t long before Boe outgrew what the community college had to offer, and one of her professors encouraged her to apply to continuing education programs at local colleges like Smith and Mount Holyoke. Her initial reaction? Fright. “I’d rather take a trailer into Manhattan during rush hour,” she remembers thinking.