While most students are in class writing and listening to boring lectures, other students are performing their way through college.

Andrea Soler, 22, has been performing at Bakersfield College and receiving college credits since she was 12 years old, she said.

Soler’s passion for the theater started when her mother, Pamela Soler, the director of “Richard III” in last semester’s Kern Shakespeare Festival, could not find a baby-sitter and took her daughter to an audition. She was cast in the show “Much Ado About Nothing” as a page. It was at that moment Soler caught the theater bug and has had it since.

Since then, she has performed in several shows a year, most of them Shakespeare, which is her passion. Some of the roles Soler has played include Lady Anne in “Richard III,” the woman character in “Laughing Wild” and Mommy in “American Dream.”

“It’s very interesting to try to find things within yourself,” she said.

Soler, who has a 3.9 GPA, recently received an award for best duo at the Empty Space theater on Oak Street.

“I’m actually pretty humble and would have preferred other people would have won the award over me,” she said, “’cause this is just my love and my hobby.”

Soler is starring as Velma, a supporting lead role, in the the Theatre Arts Department’s upcoming production of “Chicago.”

“It’s about the publicity and the newspaper controlling everything in Chicago in the 1920s where all these women that were murdering their husbands as well as boyfriends. They were turning it around as a publicity stunt trying to state how the media controls and how they sensationalize murders and crimes,” she said. “It’s a little more down to earth than the musical.”

Soler plans to graduate this semester and wants to move to Long Beach but is uncertain if she wants to be “a starving artist” or go to law school, she said.

“I’ve got the grades but not the money,” she said. She plans to apply to Harvard, Yale and Pepperdine universities.

Soler said she has had an interest in law since high school, where she participated in debate for three years. She also has taken some criminal law classes at BC.

“I think I could be a lawyer because acting is similar to a trial,” she said. “Because you have to definitely put on a show but it’s more serious.”