Three years ago this fall, I went back to school. It took me nearly a decade to get the courage to return. And, to be honest, it would’ve been impossible without Ryan. But as much as I love my husband, this post isn’t about him. Well… Maybe a little, but that’s at the end.
This post is my valedictory. And the main point of it all is that I am never going to be the valedictorian. I’m 38 years old with years of bad grades and gaps in my transcript. But it’s okay that I’m not the valedictorian. I don’t have advice for you twenty-two-year-olds who believe more school rather than life is the way to proceed. I envy the way you have your lives planned out. I was like that once. Then life happened and now I’m here, imagining myself standing in front of you in my cap and gown offering my experience as proof that we’re more than our GPAs and that John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you’re making other plans. You’re going to make a mistake. It might be choosing to go to medical school and realizing you don’t want to be a doctor after you’ve been accepted. Your world might be destroyed by a death and the world’s unfamiliarity after the dust settles might drive you to hide from your pursuits. You might meet your rounded-up-to-the-one person and follow them across the country while you figure out your next steps. I just want you to know that it’s okay to not be the valedictorian. It’s okay to mess up. To fail classes. To drop out. To quit. To run away, but only if you are honest with yourself about why and to blame Leonard Cohen it for it for years after. The only thing you need to do in life is find out who you are. That’s your only assignment.
I failed my first classes in college the fall after I graduated high school. I’ve lied for twenty years that I took that year off. When my father asked me to apply to his alma mater the next year, I submitted that failing transcript because rather than tell him I didn’t want to go to his school, I guaranteed my rejection.
The following couple of years I eked by with the “C’s get degrees” mentality. I studied abroad in Ireland for a year, where the university system was built for a foreign exchange student like me who avoided attending lectures as much as possible.
That Irish university accepted me as a regular student, and I was over the moon. I’d never felt more at home than I did at UCC and Cork in general. But my mom was sick and I wanted to be home. When she died, school became the constant in my life. I was a barely functional 23 year old who needed comfort and Western Michigan was what I had. Within a year, I’d started seeing one of my professors and had a miscarriage. Oddly, school stopped being my stability then.
I tried to go to a community college in Northern Michigan, but where school had been a haven for me since kindergarten, it was now a constant reminder of how if I’d failed.
So I moved on. No biggie, right? I found a career path to be happy and successful in even if my sister referred to it as not an adult job. I wasn’t a neurosurgeon, but if the thing we stress about employment is the satisfaction we receive from it, fuck being anything other than what made me happy. (Excuse my French.)
If I was happy, how did I end up at Front Range Community College? A million different reasons. I loved my job, but I felt something gnawing at me. Books comprised me; they still do. However, I saw something different in my future. Even thinking about returning to school was like poking a bruise to see if it still hurt. Answer: It did. It hurt so much that I broke down the final day of my first semester because I’d failed to complete the final project. Ryan thought I was crying I screwed up because I’d been cheating on him… Not that I’d failed an English comp 1 class because as soon as I fell behind I was paralyzed with the familiar fear of failure.
Here’s where I deviated from my SOP: I emailed the professor. I explained I’d lost my way. I thought I was holding it together until it became too clear I wasn’t and I shut down. And rather than ask for help, I just kept reminding myself I was never going to be a good student and this proved it.
This professor saved me. With one response, she gave me permission to have my freak out (which I’d done) and to get my project uploaded asap. On my final grade, she wrote that my writing ability was A-worthy where my ability to meet deadlines was more of a C, so the average was a B. You can’t see this, but I tear up every time I relive this moment. Mrs. Lew, I doubt you’ll ever read this, but you made this possible.
I earned a 4.0 in four of the six semesters I attended Front Range Community College. Last winter, I applied to the University of Colorado-Boulder’s history department after receiving a rejection from the same university’s nursing school. I spoke with an admissions counselor and she recommended I include a letter about my bad grades and how I was no longer that student. I wrote the letter. This fall, I had to write the letter again when my student loans were revoked because I had 206.5 credits. (I’ve 239.5 now.) In that second letter to CU, I had to explain where each of my credits came from. (If you’re interested, you’ll find the letter to the financial aid office at the end of this entry.) Hours after I submitted the letter to the admissions department, I received my acceptance to CU-Boulder. My then Spanish professor and now friend high-fived me. I was going to finish my first degree.
CU requires 45 credits to be completed on campus in order to receive a degree from them. I started in June and I graduate on Friday. Finishing the degree I started twenty years ago acted not only as a cathartic opportunity, but also increased the number of nursing programs I’m eligible for. This was logic and drive in a place I’d lost my logic and drive, if I ever had any.
Yesterday, I received an email asking me to pick up my medallion. Apparently, I’m graduating with distinction.
However, I am not the hero of my story. I’m not discounting the work I’ve put in emotionally and studiously. I worked hard, but I know this entire experience of closure and opportunity is because of my husband. He helped me through the rough bits. He supplied me with pop when I needed it. He gave me the safe space I needed to get through this. In October 2017, I left the job I loved to focus on my grades. When his sister asked if he disliked being the only income in our house, he replied time with me was greater than any income I might receive. I might’ve done the school work, but I believe he’s done the heavy-lifting. This is made doubly evident when you learn he’s pursuing and rocking his own post-graduate degree and providing for our tiny family. I hope that in the time between graduation and the start of nursing school, I have a chance to repay some of what he’s given me.
So what’s the moral of the story? I guess all I’m trying to say we’re more than our GPAs. I’m afraid my bad grades deter nursing schools from accepting me. I’m afraid this degree won’t wipe everything in my past away. I still have to submit my Western Michigan transcripts to every nursing program I apply to. But in the end, I’m okay with it. I’ll get in somehow. I’m scrappy and perseverant. I’ve some life experiences to tell me that I’m going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.
Congrats, Class of 2019!
My graduation regalia. It’s almost here.
My SAP Appeal letter to CU Boulder’s Financial Aid Department:
The day after I graduated high school in 1999, my mother had a stroke. Over the next four and a half years, her health deteriorated until October 2004 when she passed. During her illness, I tried to be an average college student. Prior to graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy, I had been accepted to the North Carolina School for the Arts, but after my mother’s stroke I chose to stay home and attend the local community college, Kirtland Community College, for a year. Distracted from school with my mother’s illness, I performed poorly at Kirtland; ten credits from Kirtland have been transferred to the University of Colorado – Boulder.
Knowing I had not performed well at Kirtland, I moved to Northland College and started fresh. The school closely resembled my high school experience and I felt at home there. I transferred from Northland to Western Michigan after my father lost his license to practice medicine; I had to return to Michigan and attend a public university as my family could no longer afford a private school’s tuition. I did transfer my credits from Northland to Western Michigan, so I started at Western with 28 credits.
After a year at Western, my father had his license back and my parents encouraged me to study abroad the following school year. My mother’s health was failing, but my parents were not entirely open about how bad it was until I was already living in Ireland. I have a clear memory of talking to my father on a payphone in a hostel and his clearing the air about how sick my mother was. I offered to come home immediately after he explained they were going away to the Lake Superior cabin for the weekend because she loved it there and he was not sure how many more weekends she had. He responded to my offer by flatly saying, “And what will you change by being here? Stay there.”
Over the course of the year, my mother’s illness was finally diagnosed, and she was improving, so I applied to stay at the University College Cork and earn my degree from that institution. I earned 32.5 credits over the course of the year and I enjoyed the community I had found at UCC. It’s hard to explain, but despite my mother’s planning to visit me the following school year, I had a feeling I should return home and finish my degree at Western, even if I was unhappy there. I was going to be closer to home and my mother.
I reentered Western Michigan University in the fall of 2003. To say I fumbled through would be a bit of an understatement; I was depressed and missing Ireland despite being happier to be in the same time zone as my mother. In March 2004, my mother was hospitalized in Ft. Myers, Florida, where she had staying with her sister for the winter. As a response, my sister and I decided our mother should stay in Florida with her family and larger support system and my sister would move in with her until I graduated the following year. Beginning the summer of 2004, I traveled to Rochester, Minnesota to meet and care for my mother during her treatments at the Mayo Clinic. When classes began in August, I explained to my professors I would be gone at least one week a month for the Mayo Clinic visits and if she was hospitalized, I would be gone for longer; my professors were all understanding. In September, she was put on the liver transplant list; her transplant specialist explained while she was not on the top of the list, her rare blood type would guarantee her a new liver in the next eight to twelve months. She died less than a month later.
In the semesters following my mother’s death, it was hard for me to find and maintain any sort of collegiate focus. And my grades reflected this. I returned to school, but it felt like an impossible task. My life was further complicated when I had a miscarriage almost a year after my mother passed. The father was a former professor of mine, and the failure of our relationship added to my sour experience at Western Michigan. With both tragedies fresh, I could not handle being in school, so I left Western with 48 credits.
At North Central Michigan College in 2007, I thought I was ready to go back to school. The University of Michigan’s medical school does not require a bachelor’s degree for admission, and I decided I wanted to be a doctor. What I discovered during my year at NCMC was that I was not over the trauma of dropping out of Western and all that had happened before I left, so I failed there as well. Only four credits were transferred to University of Colorado – Boulder, so NCMC’s impact is minimal on the page, but important to me. I used my paralyzing fear of failing one more time at school to keep me away from finishing my degree for nearly a decade.
Returning to school was a topic my husband and I had spoken about several times. And having several years of poor grades piled behind me to say I was scared would be putting it lightly. I didn’t want to fail again. So I’ve not let myself. Over the past two years at Front Range, I have worked hard to overcome my past college traumas and my fear of continued failure. Seeing the success in print has helped me as much as the support I receive from my husband and both our families. In four of the six semesters I attended FRCC, I achieved a 4.0 GPA—a feat I’ve no memory of doing before, even in high school.
My transcript at FRCC looks like it is for a different student; it’s filled with science classes rather than humanities, and with A’s rather than F’s. And there is a reason for that. The classes are all prerequisite work for a bachelor’s degree in nursing; I was giving myself a fresh start much like I did back in 2000 when I left my grades at Kirtland behind and moved onto Northland.
Unfortunately, I’ve found out that fresh starts aren’t allowed in this connected age, so I’ve had to pull my failures out into the open and explain them in college applications several times in the last two years. It brings me to tears each time. I have 206.5 credit hours on my transcript and honestly, I’m kind of proud of them. They represent some hard years, but they also represent my path to get to where I am. It’s not pretty, but I’ve done it. I’m within 33 credit hours of receiving a bachelor’s degree, which I hope will make me more attractive to a nursing program beginning in June 2019 or January 2020. Last October, I left my job to focus on school full time and it paid off with 39 credit hours of straight A’s at FRCC along with three A’s and one A- during the summer here at CU. I’m taking 18 credit hours this fall; which is a lot, but my job helped me develop my time management skills and I have a great support core at home. I plan to finish up with 15 credit hours in the spring and graduate in May.