“Oh my God! What have I gotten myself into,” he called out to the cosmos at the edge of panic. Uncontrollable shivers wracked his body as cold sweat boiled onto the schedule his sickened form stooped over. 

More or less that’s how I felt after I first enrolled for classes at Boise State University (BSU).

Prior to this, life for me was to leave for work at six-thirty, five mornings a week for eight to ten hours a day, my wife worked, out of a desire for self-fulfillment rather than necessity while the kids attended school and other activities; we ate dinner together at six-thirty, and engaged in regular family activities.

I was medically retired after 14 years and was faced with the choice: look for work or go back to school. I was receiving an income from my retirement and my wife was willing to increase her workload to compensate so I could go back to school. Using grants and my VA benefits I joined the ranks of the American subculture of nontraditional students. 

Before BSU, I was not unfamiliar with college. The Air Force has their own Community College (CCAF) degree program in which a military member can earn an Associate of Applied Science (AAS) in their career field by attending classes at partnering schools. 

My first college class at the College of Southern Nevada (CSN) was an introductory art class, thinking it would be simple for me to pass because it was a subject I enjoyed.

This marked a start of 

a tentative relationship 

with higher education. 
  
I was twenty-three, had three children under the age of five, had been married for a few years, and was working full time as the low man in a maintenance field. All of these factors, according to the statistics discussed by Taniguchi, prophesied my past collegiate demise.

Hiromi Taniguchi and Gayle Kaufman’s study define nontraditional students as “those who enter four-year colleges or universities as adults, or at age 21 or older” and state that a lower chance of achieving a degree than traditional students (912). 
The reasons they listed were:

•Access to financial aid,

•Course load,

•Student’s marital status, and

•Having children not in school, regardless of the gender of the parent, which lowered the chances of completing a degree program by as much as 50 percent (Taniguchi and Kaufman).

Another Collage of Self, from Drawing 101

The CSN course was Drawing 101,  four hours every Saturday for sixteen weeks. we students came to calling our professor “The Nazi” who was an average height, heavy set woman with the habit or often giggled to herself.

Her introductory monologue that she would run her class as a graduate level class. And she did, assigning upwards of 30 plus sketches a week, she was appalled that I had extra time to watch a movie with my family. The Nazi had a strict attendance policy and, for the first time in over a year, my unit had to work one weekend a month. When I explained the situation, she stated, “We all have problems”.

On my part,  

I didn’t apply myself and ended up failing.

One of the key factors to my scholastic troubles 

         was poor study habits, which were to

                  behave as if I didn’t need to study most days

                        and only focus on individual projects some days.

Now we fast forward

past my incomplete Sociology class,         deployment for Operation Iraqi Freedom; past the several military schools and classes while being stationed in various countries; past the nearly failed foreign language class;

slowing to take note of

the solitary success of Algebra:
an online exercise of 
adrenaline and Juggernautish persistence. 

Working 6 days, 16 to 24 hours, a week, 

I passed Math 154. 

But I knew that wouldn’t carry me through the rest of my career as a student.

We come to January 2011

The scene at the beginning of this essay was playing out in my gut.

One thing the guidance counselors, advisers, and orientation leaders tend to skip, or at least glaze over, is the personal costs of being a student with family responsibilities. Some might call these the CONS of going back to school.  

I’m often absent from dinner.

My wife and I now share responsibility of financially providing for our family.

I'm not able to attend all of the children's  school functions or helping with their homework, 
putting more parental responsibilities solely on my wife ,
who has adjusted to compensating for my lessened involvement with house and family responsibilities. 

  

We still have family time,but it's more sporadic and takes more planning. Even in those rare moments of leisure, I’m constantly aware that the next assignment’s due.

Family picture, shadows

 

sacrificing time with my wife and children to devote to studies, 

giving up working, and

pushing down the feeling that I’m neglecting my responsibilities. 

I have also had to adjust to my spouse fulfilling obligations

I once thought of as personal identifiers, 

all in support of my dreams to develop a new skill set that I may be a better writter as well as proving to myself that I can succeed in school and be a rolemodel for my children.

Our four children understand the reasons for these changes, but they have had to:

cope with less time available from me and 

have expressed dismay with my irritableness, or 

that I often come home later now than I did when I was working.

And, with so many obstacles (family affairs, struggling with my self-image as a family man and student, the shadow of past collegiate failures), the question lingered; why was I able to perform better 

at Boise State University?

A study by Mark Hoyert and Cynthia O'Dell  discusses how two goal sets students follow, Performance Orientated Goals (caring more about what marks they earn), and Learning Goals (understanding the information), effect how students perform during their studies. Those in the first group struggled more because of an inability to adjust to failures. For me, Performance Orientation was more generalized to simply passing the courses, but, regardless where the bar was set, the outcome was the same. With each perceived failure, there was a sense of helplessness and self-degradation. Having again returned to school, older and (one would hope) wiser, I had progressed into the Learning Goals set which translated into learning more effective study habits (Hoyert and O'Dell 4).

Having passed several classes at this point, the salty tears in the proverbial bucket of those failures are quickly being deluded as each completed assignment and passed test pours a renewed self-image as a student into it.

 Achieving collegiate success is no different than training for the big fight, it takes preparation, dedication, and hard work.

The two most important keys to keeping success building are:

1.      Have a written plan of when to study and for how long each day, and

2.      Keep my goal in front of me: Graduate, as an English Student with a writing emphasis and to develop a strong skill-base to pursue a career as an Author.

Studying is no different from achieving a goal and, in fact, is a smaller part of the larger goal of being a degree holder.

•         Know exactly what I’m working toward,(I would be working towards the next paper or exam).
•     Outline the steps to get there (the steps may be in an outline, listing what points I want to make and what types of evidence is needed, or a study guide with the specific areas of focus for the class). And
•    Take action (block out a time to remove myself from as many opportunities for procrastination as possible and focus on achieving the first two points).

 

  
 The difference between, “Hey, buddy. You really should read that chapter", and having studying time planned, reviewing it regularly, and acting on it, is ginormous.

The road hasn’t been easy, and there have been unforeseen problems with school and family concerns, but I’m succeeding because my motivations have changed.

I still fight daily:

to stay focused on the task at hand, avoiding a strong propensity towards distractions,

to keep-up with the workload,

to keep my self-talk in check,

to overcome a low self-image of my abilities as a result of my past failures in school, and

to balance my family life and other issues.

At times it feels like juggling flaming machetes. But I’m relying on tenaciousness and the support from my wife and kids to help me stay focused and motivated.

Work Cited:

Hoyert, Mark Sudlow, and Cynthia D. O'Dell. "Goal Orientation and Academic Failure in Traditional and Nontraditional Aged College Students." College Student Journal 43.4 (2009): 1052-1061. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection. EBSCO. Web. 19 Sept. 2011.

Taniguchi, Hiromi, and Gayle Kaufman. "Degree Completion Among Nontraditional College Students." Social Science Quarterly (Blackwell Publishing Limited) 86.4 (2005): 912-927. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection. EBSCO. Web. 19 Sept. 2011.