Melissa Brindley: What I Learned About Returning to College Later in Life

我三十多岁时决定回大学读书。 我在霍尔马克（Hallmark）和好莱坞录像公司（Hollywood Video）这样的商店里做了几年似乎没有前途的零售工作，似乎我工作过的每一家商店最终都破产了。 It happened so many times, my friends started calling me the Grim Reaper of Retail. I felt like I needed to do something to get myself into a career with a good future. I had always wanted to be a writer, but years of hearing there was “no money in writing” made me afraid I couldn’t make a career out of it. My mom suggested I pursue a business degree because it was practical—something I could use in a variety of ways. I enrolled at Mt. Hood Community College since it was only two miles away from my home and it shared a strong transfer degree program with Eastern Oregon University.  I was excited about going back to school but when the first day of fall term arrived, I told my husband I was nervous.

“What if the other kids don’t like me?” I asked, only half-joking. Would I be confronted with a roomful of recent high school graduates wondering what I was doing there?

I was in for a surprise that day when I saw that my classmates covered an impressively wide age range—from teenagers fresh out of high school to people in their sixties pursuing a second college degree. As my very first Business 101 class ended, I heard someone call my name and looked up to see an acquaintance from high school bustling toward me. It turns out she had decided to go back to college at the exact same time I had. The moment I saw her, I felt like the universe was telling me I was in the right place at the right time.

Since then, I’ve learned there are a lot of benefits of returning to school later in adulthood. To begin with, I appreciate the opportunity more now than I did in my late teens. I no longer think of going to school as something I have to do; I think of it as something I get to do. I get to go to class, I get to study, and I get to learn new things. Having a more positive attitude also means I’m able to focus on studying more easily now than I was able to  in the past.

房颤

Returning to school to pursue a long-time aspiration seems to be a common experience among older students who have finally figured out what they want to be now that they’re grown up. Which brings me to the most important thing I’ve discovered about returning to college later in life: I’m not alone. According to the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), 28 percent of first generation college students are thirty or older. These students have chosen to go back to school for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to finish their education, get a second degree, or because they don’t ever want to stop learning. In the words of George Eliot, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”