Returning to School After a Career

As a young girl, my family never really talked about college or bachelors degrees. It was just assumed that when you became an adult you went to work. My father was from a large southern family with few college grads and my mother from a more educated family where her mother was an RN and all the children went to college and completed bachelor’s degrees. So, as a small town girl, who started her married family life young, college was a fantasy, a what-if, definitely not a need. Or, so I thought.

Then I hit the job market and it didn’t take long working various factory, food service and retail jobs to decide that college was a necessity and not a distant dream. My first step was to go to a few local colleges and see what was needed to enroll. Less painless than I had feared, the entrance exams quickly led to perusing course schedules and setting up meetings with advisors.

Money was an object, and unlike today, there were not as many financing options and programs available to working, non-traditional students. Out came the credit cards and I limited my classes to those that would provide immediate, job enhancing skills paying off each semester as I went. Taking one to three classes a semester was tough, especially with a husband, a son and a job, but I knew to better myself and my family, I had to do it.

Thankfully, semesters don’t last the entire year, and I quickly learned to manage my time with a family/assignment/work white board and a few late nights. Every year was scheduled around class schedules, and family vacations were so much more meaningful at the end of the semester. Within 4 short years of starting my bachelor’s degree, I had acquired the knowledge and skills to launch my career in accounting. Pursuing my degree greatly increased my income and my family’s standard of living.

Along the way, my classes, professors and other students exposed me to greater understanding of the world around. I knew that college would train me in my chosen field of accounting, what I didn’t realize was that getting a bachelor’s degree would also broaden my horizons and give me the opportunity to learn things in depth.

By the time I started the final push to complete my lifelong goal of a bachelor’s degree, accelerated and online university programs were readily available, as were many more financing options.

The road was not short, nor was it easy, but the day I graduated with my bachelor’s degree was one of the happiest, and was the most self-satisfying, days of my life.