I Became a Full-Time College Student at 48

Just Another Late Bloomer Story

Hello. This is Shy Guy Meets the Buddha: Reflections on Work, Love, and Nature, and I’m Don Boivin. Thanks for being here. If you like what you are about to read, please consider a small token of appreciation; a tip or paid subscription would be so generous and so helpful. Thank you! 🙏 (“Buy Me a Coffee” is an online tipping platform where you can tip as little as $5 to your favorite hard-working writer 😊)

In May of 2016, I walked into the registrar’s office at Bridgewater State University in southeastern Massachusetts, where I’d been studying English Literature as a full-time in-person adult student for the last two years, presented my license to the work-study student behind the counter, and collected my diploma; a Bachelor of Arts, nicely framed in a soft-covered folder. The young woman smiled, then turned to the next person in line before I could even say, Proudest moment of my life. I walked out to the parking lot, took one last look at the stately brick buildings surrounding the empty quad, then got into my car and drove the familiar one-and-a-half-hour commute home. I was fifty-one years old.

Beginnings

I come from a large Catholic family in a mid-sized Massachusetts factory town. My parents both dropped out of high school; dad to work on the family farm and mom to help her parents pay the rent with a factory job. After four years in the Army and a short stint as a truck driver for a local textile plant, dad joined the carpenters’ union, where he spent the rest of his career building bridges and commercial structures in Boston. Mom was busy caring for us eight kids (her brood includes two sets of fraternal twins, of which I am the second-born of the second set).

Higher education was not expected of my siblings and me, nor can I recall it even being mentioned.

I do remember the mandatory pre-graduation meeting with my high school guidance counselor:

GC: Have you thought about college?
ME: I guess. I don’t know.
GC: Well, what do you like to do?
ME: I really like the outdoors. Camping is awesome.
GC: Have you ever heard of Paul Smith’s College? They have a great outdoor recreation program.
ME: No, I never heard of it.
GC: You should apply. Here’s an application packet.
ME: Okay, thanks.

I really do love the outdoors, but I also spent most of my indoor time reading books. That never came up in the meeting.

I started at Paul Smith’s the following September, paying the tuition with money I’d saved pumping gas at the local Getty station. But I quickly ran out of funds. My second semester would be paid for with student loans and that scared me. Also, I was homesick, confused about my future, and thinking that if I was going into debt, I wanted it to be for something I knew I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I dropped out. I figured I’d make some money for a while and then reassess my plans.

My girlfriend’s dad gave me a job framing houses. On my first day, watching me swing a hammer, he asked if I’d been practicing at home; I guess I picked up the skill pretty quickly. But after eight months, I quit that job and joined the Army. My boss was fine with that; in fact, he was proud of me. That is, until he heard I went AWOL two years later (read more about that difficult experience here). After that the message came via his daughter that he wanted nothing to do with me—and don’t come looking for my job back, either.

I tried college again after the Army. I’d seen the Nick Nolte film, Teachers, and had experienced what I thought was an epiphany; I would make a good teacher. I enrolled in the teacher’s program at Bridgewater State College (now Bridgewater State University). Unfortunately, after the trauma of trying to be a good soldier while also coming to understand that I was a pacifist at heart, I was an emotional wreck. I should have been in therapy but, as with college, no one had mentioned the option to me.

So, for my second attempt at higher education, I didn’t even last the semester. My older brother was framing condos with some large construction firm so I signed on with them, where I continued to get good at something I was pretty sure I didn’t want for a career. The money was good and I felt more comfortable with a power saw in my hands and the sun overhead than I would have stocking shelves or sitting in an office.

And then I got married.

Two sweet children came into the world and that compelled me to keep on doing the carpentry thing. My father got me in the union and I tried to be happy with that.

I attempted to earn a degree at night—my third go—this time at a technical school, studying architectural drafting (I was trying to be sensible, realistic; and I had, after all, excelled in a high school drafting course). But it was all just too overwhelming—leaving the apartment before sunrise, working with materials and equipment all day, then driving from the job site in Boston to the school in Providence, Rhode Island; fathering as best I could at night and on weekends; and trying my hardest to come up with some definition of love that could encompass my slowly-disintegrating marriage.

I dropped out again. Now I was a three-time college dropout. I figured I’d better forget about college—this was starting to get embarrassing.

Then I got divorced. Though it was hard, it did—as with leaving the Army—mark the beginning of a turnaround.

The Turning Point

Things stagnated for a while as I tried to learn how to be a single dad and to catch up on the debt I’d fallen into. A couple of years after the divorce, I got into this huge fight with the woman I was seeing. I was literally living in a tent (for several summers in a row I’d served as a host-camper at a state park on Cape Cod), I’d been battling my children’s mother for visitation rights, and my life was pretty much defined by stress and hopelessness. I realized how ridiculous it was to be arguing with yet another woman about her needs while putting my own aside, and suddenly everything just sort of shut down. Something clicked in my brain, or short-circuited or something. I threw my backpack in my car and drove away. Far away.

From Massachusetts to Georgia on autopilot, my last six-hundred dollars in my pocket, making no decisions and coming to no clarity, I just let my body take me where it would. Cruising in a southerly direction but vaguely knowing that I didn’t want to end up in Florida, I remembered that I had a grandfather in California whom I’d only met once. I turned west.

Photo by Ebenezer Chelliah on Unsplash

I was gone for three months. I wasn’t abandoning my kids or my responsibilities; I just needed a retreat, lest I break down completely. Like a wounded woodlands animal who instinctually crawls into a den of leaves and focuses all its energy on recovery, ignoring the need for food, ignoring the herd, I was heeding my survival instincts.

I never made it to California. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, my car’s clutch failed, and I was forced to cease my involuntary propulsion. I found work at the Santa Fe hostel in exchange for a room for a month or so, then made my way north to another hostel in the mountains outside of Taos (I figured out how to drive my car without a clutch). I began to heal my wounds.

New Mexico is where I discovered my spark, my self-confidence, the courage to be myself, to be whole. (Consequently, New Mexico, the land of enchantment, will always hold a very special place in my heart.)

An Old Dream

This story is about how I got my degree late in life, not my divorce or my kids, so I’ll refrain from sharing more details on that part of the story, except to say I am proud of my two beautiful children, a daughter and son now in their thirties, both smart and sensitive and creative, each pursuing his or her own version of a life well-lived.

I’ll skip ahead to 2012. Back in Massachusetts, married now to my soul mate, Jennifer, I’d been working pretty hard and managed to buy a house, remodel it, and then sell it (yep; still a carpenter). I did that a few more times and then had a little money in the bank. I felt that old craving reasserting itself, that deeper calling. All I knew was that books and the written word were still as important to me as ever. I continued to read every day, sometimes consuming books like I was starving.

I got the idea to share the literary wealth. I would volunteer for the Cape Cod Literacy Center, helping adults learn to speak and write English as a second language. That’s what got me back into the classroom. And it was in that evening literacy class at Barnstable High School, strolling along the aisles, leaning over desks to help students with their work, that my old dream came crashing back. I loved helping others and connecting them to literature. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that in any sort of career capacity without a degree.

I also, and more importantly, understood that it was simply time, once and for all, to finish what I’d started so long ago. Even if I didn’t become a teacher, I knew that I had to have that degree. It was as if it already belonged to me, and I had merely neglected to claim it. Now, I only had to finalize a few details in order to get my diploma into my hands; namely, enroll in a college program and earn about 120 credits!

This resolve to become a college student and earn my degree, at 47 years old, came so powerfully and irreversibly; it was similar to the psychological shift that led to my New Mexico retreat. The rest was just fulfillment.

An “Adult Student”

I enrolled at Cape Cod Community College (CCCC) and got all of my prerequisites out of the way. I was able to transfer a few credits from my early years but I still needed to take at least four classes per semester. The basic composition courses were a delight. I managed to squeeze in some creative writing and journalism classes and even joined the college newspaper, where I learned about interviewing and publishing, graphic layout, story headlining, etc. I even addressed my fear of public speaking in a human communications class (not saying I solved that fear lol). The maths... I got through them.

At 4Cs, as we affectionately call our community college, I took a job as a peer tutor in the writing center, helping other students, many of them adults like me, write their college papers. This is where I really brushed up on English grammar, punctuation, and usage, learning many of the more obscure rules and devices; when to hyphenate a multi-word adjective, for example, or how to recognize a dangling modifier; how to introduce and close an essay, and how to stay on point. The students who came to the writing center were eager to improve their writing skills and grades, and were generally filled with gratitude. I can honestly say that working as a peer tutor was my favorite job ever. I’d still be doing it today if it hadn’t been a temporary work-study position (that only paid ten dollars an hour!).

For my degree program, I transferred to Bridgewater State University, the same school I’d dropped out of twenty-eight years before. At first, I majored in English with a minor in education, but when I realized that was going to require more than two years of full-time study, I dropped the minor. The bachelor’s was the goal, and I knew I couldn’t afford to go any longer than four years total; I would have completely blown through my savings as well as my intellectual and emotional reserves. I had two more years in me and I gave it my all. I threw myself into reading and writing about English literature; the Classics, Romantic poetry, Shakespeare, linguistics, a course in Caribbean Lit and another in Young Adult Fiction. My favorite was Early American Lit; Thoreau and Whitman specifically. I landed an internship as assistant editor on the Thoreau Society’s scholarly journal, The Concord Saunterer.

Should I talk about ageism? Yes, I experienced it. Being an adult student was easier at the community college, where there were more students of “a certain age” pursuing certificate programs for counseling, nursing, and the like, but at the same time, that is where I ran into a professor—a popular instructor with a host of young sycophants—who clearly and deliberately gave his adult students the brush-off. In another class, a young student looked at me, then turned to his classmates and asked, “What’s he doing here?” And more than once, I was mistaken for the teacher on the first day of a new class (both awkward and flattering). At the university, the discomfort was mostly my own; my classes mainly consisted of students not long out of high school. One of the many feelings that brought up for me was that I was taking something from these kids that wasn’t rightfully mine. I had much to offer in group discussions but often waited until I was sure every other student had taken their turn.

Aside from a few incidents, though, I was widely accepted, encouraged, and supported, at both schools. Cape Cod Community College became a second home to me, and I am still friends with several of the professors and students I met there.

I didn’t walk the BSU stage on graduation day, mainly due to that discomfort I mentioned about the age disparity. I actually did walk the stage to collect my associate’s at 4Cs two years earlier, proudly.

In Closing

A few years before this transformative period, I was getting coffee at a cafe on the lower Cape, taking a break from a home-repair project I’d contracted in the neighborhood. As I carried my mug to a free table, an affable older gentleman, sitting back with his legs crossed, commented, “You look like a carpenter with a college degree.” I was flattered, and also a little disappointed that my reply must only be, “I wish.” But I understood what he was seeing.

He was seeing me.

What you are looking for is already in you…You already are everything you are seeking. Thich Nhat Hanh.

There may not have been a lot of fanfare on the day I finally took home my bachelor’s degree, but later that month, my wife threw me a big party. All my friends and family were there. My new degree was passed around for everyone to see, and since then it has hung on the wall in my bedroom, over my bureau, where I see it every day.

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Your questions and comments are welcome, especially if you’re thinking about going back to school or pursuing any goal that feels awkwardly late. I can personally vouch for that much-repeated colloquialism: IT’S NEVER TOO LATE!

My college funding sources:

1. Savings

2. Financial aid

3. Student loans

4. Veterans Administration (it took me about a year to convince the VA that despite not serving my full term, I was eligible for a least some education benefits)

5. Work-study

6. Paid internship

7. Scholarship (at the community college, I applied for and won a couple of scholarships for students in undergraduate education studies)

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*All pics by, or at the direction of, Don Boivin, unless otherwise indicated