An "A" for Perseverance

Photo: Duane, Josh, and Rachel surround the newly graduated me. We are all dressed up and I am wearing a black robe over my navy-and-white polka dotted dress. There is a black mortarboard graduate's hat on my head with a burnt-orange tassel. The sun was very bright that day.

     Twenty-seven years ago next week, I sat, apart from my family, in an indoor arena that could hold nearly 18,000 people. In Austin, the Frank Erwin Center is called The Drum or The Superdrum. It was built in 1977 of satiny grey concrete, has hosted rock concerts (of which we attended several) and sports games, and sits stern and majestic on the outer fringe of the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. 

    That day, more than a thousand Business School students (I do not know the actual exact number) sat on folding chairs on the floor of the vast arena while their families and friends occupied the stadium stands. That's where my family was. I could not see them and I was pretty sure they could not see me. Some students had painted names and slogans on their mortarboard hats so that they might be picked out from the sea of black hats. I did not do that. I was thirty years old.

    It had been such a harrowing, exhausting, and sometimes exhilarating journey to get to that day. I was not the traditional student. In the stands were my parents (obv, right?) and my brother, but also my husband and our two children - aged 12 and 5 and my in-laws. My college experience was so utterly unlike those of the young 22-year-olds that surrounded me that it seemed preposterous. And it might have been unbelievable that a young woman who only started college when her oldest was two years old had been able to stick with it that long. I knew many older students like me who took the chicken-exit. But I somehow stayed.

    My first college classes were taken at the local Austin Community College, which were actually held at the even-more-local high school in the evenings. I started with one course at a time on Wednesday nights from 6 to 9. We'd park the kids at my parents, where they'd have dinner and play with the grands while we took night classes. The one-at-a-time class progressed to two-at-a-time, for which I was given dispensation from work to attend. I'd change my shoes and drive a few blocks to the downtown campus, trying to blend in with the other students. After a few years of that, while working a pretty sweet full-time job, I decided to cut my work hours by half and transfer to the University. In Austin, it is The University. Not that it is the only one, but the most prestigious, even among the private schools.

    By the time I got to UT proper, I was twenty-eight and had put in eight long years of night classes, lunch-hour classes, commuting, eating lunch in the car at stop lights, juggling motherhood and maternity and math tests and management lectures, counting plus-3-hours, plus-6-hours, until I finally got to 120 hours of coursework that entitled me to apply for graduation. At that time, there were no online classes (there was, still, no online), no special credit acknowledgment of "life experiences", no non-traditional student programs, no allowances for sheer perseverance. I had studied for many exams with a sick kid draped across my lap. I had done homework after the cupcakes for tomorrow's school party were awaiting cooling before icing. My husband could be credited with enabling my accomplishment. He kept working, playing leapfrog with our careers, giving me space for homework, studying, writing papers, heading to libraries for research. Without search-engines and Wikipedia, this meant viewing rolls of microfiche and using the computer lab on campus. To get in to the lab, one had to show one's school ID and bring two 5 1/4-inch floppy disks - one for the operating system and one for your personal data. When I had finally racked up the required coursework, I requested admission to the graduation ceremonies.

    Going to school while working and raising a family was hard. We were working so didn't qualify for any grants, and the idea of loans scared me. So, we scrimped and saved, paid tuition and bought textbooks with our slim household budget. Someone once told me that it didn't hurt kids to have their parents get educated. In our household, I drilled into both kids how putting school before everything else in life was the right way to do it. Both our children went straight to college, and completed their degrees the traditional way.

   That day, as I sat there on a plastic and metal folding chair in a sea of graduates attired in shiny black robes, faces scrubbed of last night's pre-grad beer party, benefitting from Mom and Dad's tuition payments, I felt tears rolling from my eyes. As I sniffled, the sweet-faced young girl to my left heard my sniffles and smiled at me. "Aww, this should be the happiest day of your life!" she reassured me, pulling me in for a one-arm hug. 

    "You have no idea," I told her as the announcer started calling our names.