Your path: Strange Path Through College
Dorothy Wilhelm's
Strange Path Through College
Excerpt from a column by Dorothy Wilhelm in The Tacoma News Tribune,
April 7, 2008.
Just after high school, I enrolled at Gonzaga University in Spokane during the first years women were admitted to those sober halls of learning.
The ratio of men to women was 7 to 1.
It took just a year to select my future mate, wrap him up and take him home. I felt no stab of regret. I'd gotten my MRS. degree in the years when that was the only degree that really mattered.
More than 25 years later, college doors opened again. This time it was Fort Steilacoom Community College (now Pierce College) in Lakewood, and this time I brought my daughter Gina with me. Gina and I had the most important qualifications needed to enter the halls of higher learning. She was toilet trained, and so was I. She was just 3, and I was 46.
I believed I was too old to study for a degree but I could take a few art classes. Before long, I had 73 credits and was teaching community art classes. I was sure I'd gone about as far as I could go.
Unexpectedly, in the year that Gina was 6, I found myself a widow and a single mom. School wasn't for play anymore.
At this point, I learned about the Prior Learning Assessment Program at Marylhurst University near Portland. No free ride, this respected 32-year-old program is meticulous and often more arduous than regular classroom work.
Documented learning is the key. But it does allow a student to earn credit for subjects learned earlier in life. As I completed the process of documentation, I was overjoyed to discover that I had not wasted my first 50 years. Added to my credits from Pierce College, I needed only one more year of classroom work to complete my degree.
That's when I learned that whatever you need to do, the chance will always be there if you look for it.