by Carla White

Created on: November 24, 2009

Returning to school when you're "older": the joys, the struggles

Upon completing undergraduate school, I had no specific career in mind, like many liberal arts students. Having been in school 20 years straight, almost since I started to walk, it was only natural to be thoroughly burnt out on classrooms and being told by others what to read and write about. I was mentally exhausted from four years in a highly rigorous academic institution. It made no sense to rush off to graduate school and pile on more debt in this condition.

Eleven years later I was a different person: infinitely wiser, more disciplined, humbled by a solid decade of life experience. But the critical piece was I now knew myself, where my interests lay, what my skills were, what I had to offer the world. After years of living on the edge working in a number of social service and health-oriented jobs, often with no health insurance and always for criminally low pay, I was ready to continue doing work I loved AND make a decent living doing it. I decided to get my Master's in Public Health.

Thirty three might not sound tremendously old, but a person that age is in a completely different time of life and stage of development from most other people in graduate school. Throughout the process - from deciding to do it to completing the degree - there were many advantages to being more mature and experienced, and there were challenges.

Joy #1: Making a change

It is simply exciting to decide to do something big for yourself, launch into a new adventure, throw open the doors. Keep your eyes open in your daily life: if you do not truly enjoy what you do every day, if you are not learning regularly doing what you do, if you feel you want something more, change it. Going back to school at this stage of life meant quitting a job, taking on significant debt, moving across the country, and possibly ending a four year relationship (it didn't: we ended up getting engaged across 2,000 miles and are happily married now, almost ten years later). But the decision was freeing and worth every penny and moment of not knowing how it would all work out. In short, it was what I wanted and needed to do.

Challenge #1: You're rusty

First, there's the GRE (Graduate Record Exam). I had not had a math class in 15 years, except for learning to calculate drip rates for IV bags. Suddenly I had to answer things like this within a strict time limit (sample question from ETS.org): If the average (arithmetic mean) of 5 consecutive integers

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