PINCKNEYVILLE - Graduating from Rend Lake College will be a milestone moment for Maddelynn and Alexandria Hawkins of Pinckneyville - mainly because they haven't graduated high school yet.

After starting to earn college credits through Rend Lake the summer after their eighth-grade graduation, the 18-year-old twins will now collect associate's degrees in science from the community college a week before receiving diplomas from Pinckneyville Community High School.

"It's kind of surreal," Maddy said. "We've always just gone to school. We never really thought of it as anything else."

Alex will join fellow graduates in walking across Rend Lake's stage Friday, but her sister will miss out on the event. Maddy and her mother, Casey, will be traveling to San Antonio where she will accept a Toyota Community Service Scholarship that could contribute up to $20,000 toward her further education at Saint Louis University.

The Toyota scholarship tops a laundry list of scholarships, awards and recognitions the twins have earned. Casey Hawkins, their mother and a counselor at Trico High School, said the money definitely helps because Maddy plans to study medicine at SLU and Alex plans to follow her father's footsteps and study dentistry at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

"I've always watched him enjoy his job," Alex said of her father, adding she hopes to one day take over the family business.

At SLU, Maddy has been accepted into the med-scholars program, which allows her to begin working on higher-level classes her second year and improves her chances of being accepted into medical school. She will also take part in the cheerleading team for men's and women's basketball.

While she'll be splitting apart from her sister, Alex will be reunited at SIUE with their two brothers, who also happen to be twins. But the two sisters aren't worried about being apart because their two new homes will only be about half an hour apart.

"I kind of wanted to break away from the twin thing," Maddy said.

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