Grad school in midlife
I remember someone once telling me about a friend who had decided to reinvent her life—she flew to Paris and, in those pre-BlackBerry days, threw her address book off Pont Neuf.
The cheaper way of doing this is to become a student again.
You may have a high profile in your career or community; in grad school, chances are no one will have heard of you. The flip side: You won’t have heard of them either. Which is why starting grad school is like being the newbie at high school, minus the lockers and clothing anxiety.
It wasn’t actually my idea to head back to university in my late forties. I’d been teaching journalism for some time at an institution that had a venerable record as a polytechnic. In the 1990s, though, it decided it wanted to become a “real” university, and the implications of that, beyond changing signage and letterhead, were that faculty members seeking tenure had to have at least a master’s degree. So I found myself strapping on a backpack filled with pens, notebooks and Post-it Notes my students had given me, and headed off to discover what it’s like on the other side of the podium.
A diverse group
It rapidly became apparent that grad students are generally a gregarious bunch, perhaps as a result of spending so much solitary time reading impenetrable texts. (A grad student joke: “You just might be a grad student if you are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to read.”) Parties were almost as regular a feature as assignment due dates, and it turned out this was one interesting high school! There was the well-known book agent, one of the few female cinematographers in Canada, a doula, a senior undercover policeman, a one-time student radical from Iran...every one of them over 40, and each a portal into a new world. At our get-togethers, we bonded over hilarious instances when our “real” lives intersected with our student personas. Like the time the cop was training a junior in undercover techniques, but also had an appointment with a faculty member. The trainee was supposed to be trailing him — a difficult task in our very typical academic office space of one long corridor of private offices. The desperate novice finally dove under the desk of a female faculty member, hissing, “It’s okay, I’m a police officer.”
