Twenty days. That's how long Dr. Jordan Wills had left in her family medicine residency when we spoke—not that she was counting. The 2010 Benton Grade School alumna was completing three years at Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, the culmination of a journey that began in the classrooms where her mother still teaches eighth-grade math.

"I come from a family of only teachers," Jordan explains, ticking through the educational legacy: both parents, her grandfather, her aunt who taught at Benton High School, and her younger brother Mason, who just started teaching history in Neoga. "I'm kind of the exception to the rule."

But not really. The daughter of Kelly Wills (Benton Grade School) and Tim Wills (Rend Lake College) may have chosen medicine over education, but the teaching runs deep in her practice. "I use a lot of those skills that I've learned from my parents, like teaching the patients why I recommend this," she reflects. "It's helpful to be able to explain it in a way that's like, we're on the same page."

Jordan's path to medicine wasn't predetermined. After graduating from Benton High School in 2014, she headed to Rend Lake College with pharmacy school in mind. But chemistry wasn't her passion—biology was. One day, a "little bug got in my ear" suggesting she shadow a doctor. She spent a day with a surgeon in Mount Vernon and came home with an announcement that shocked her teaching family: "I want to go to medical school."

The decision to start at Rend Lake rather than a four-year university wasn't just financial. "I was very wary of going away to a big university," she admits. "I was so used to being constantly surrounded by people I knew." She wanted small class sizes, professors who knew her name, the continuation of what she'd experienced at Benton Grade School where teachers knew your family and genuinely wanted you to succeed.

This preference for intimate educational settings guided her choices throughout. She finished her biology degree at SIUE, then chose SIU School of Medicine specifically for its small class sizes. "I knew everybody by name. I knew their backstory, I knew their families," she says of her medical school cohort. "You can take the girl out of the small town..."

Jordan credits her success partly to natural ability but mostly to upbringing. "I always knew that I was expected to do my best—not to get perfect grades, but to try hard," she recalls. Her mother never hovered but had one non-negotiable rule: if extra credit was available, you did it, even if you already had the best score in the class.

That work ethic, cultivated in Benton's classrooms and on its volleyball and softball fields, carried her through the grueling years of medical training. Sports taught her "what you're made of" but also "why it's so important to work in a team and how to interact with authority and learn your own leadership style."

Now, as she prepares to practice family medicine—seeing everyone from newborns to elderly patients, conducting women's healthcare, performing procedures—Jordan's long-term vision leads back to where she started. "I feel very passionate about small-town medicine and rural practice," she says. "There's never enough doctors down in southern Illinois."

She recently completed a month-long rotation in a rural setting west of St. Louis. "I was like, this feels like home. These are my people."

When city colleagues ask about Benton, Jordan starts by explaining what "small" really means: 100 kids in her graduating class, knowing everyone at the grocery store, high school sports as Friday night entertainment. But the heart of her description is harder to capture: "Everybody cares about everybody to some degree that you don't get when you have the anonymity of being in the city."

That caring continues. When she visits home and runs into people who taught her or knew her as a child, "I don't have to be with my parents. The people who stop me and talk to me and ask how I'm doing, they actually genuinely care."

If she could advise her middle-school self—the one sitting in what's now her mother's math classroom—Jordan would say: "Don't take everything quite so hard. You're 12 years old and you have absolutely no idea all the cool stuff you're going to get to do and all the people you're going to get to meet and all the people you're going to get to help."

From the girl who waited tables in Benton to the physician who will soon serve communities much like it, Jordan Wills proves that sometimes the exception to the family rule is just another way of carrying on the tradition of service. And we’re all here for it.