Going away to school at my age

In My Humble Opinion
1

What would you think of going away to school when you’re in your mid-40s?

That’s the question I might well be facing. In a nutshell, I’ve decided to go back to school. I already have a bachelor’s degree; this would be for studies in a professional faculty. There is a good university in our city, and I originally decided to apply only there. If I got in, great; if not, I’d try again next year.

Then my wife had an idea: why not apply to a couple of other schools as well? If my original choice didn’t accept me, another might.

Going to another school would mean going away to that school, and I’m unsure how I feel about that. I’m far from being a young person who just wants to get out of his parents’ house. My wife and I own our own home, we have no children, and we’re nicely settled in our middle age. Really, I don’t know if I’d want to live like a student again.

On the other hand, I do want to go back to school and get this degree. My wife is certainly supportive; she knows that I want it. Still, it was kind of a shock to hear her say that she was prepared to have me living in another city while I got it.

Just to forestall any questions, my wife is not trying to get rid of me. She does enough business travel that she’d probably be in the cities where the other schools are a number of times a year, and they’re not that far away–one is only a three hour drive. We’d see each other often enough.

Anyway, this question would be a no-brainer if I was in my 20s, but I’m not. What do you think of the situation? Should I go away to school if I’m not accepted at the local school but am accepted elsewhere? Or should I stay local, just applying to the local school, and repeating as necessary?

2

My mother and stepfather did it when they were in their late 40’s-early 50’s. He went to graduate school and then became a professor about 6 hours drive from where they used to live. Even if you have to take a plane, there aren’t many areas of the country that you can’t reach in 8 hours. It worked out fine and they live back together and are happy as ever now that they have both finished and achieved what they wanted. I know several married professor couples that have tenure at universities thousands of miles apart.

Your age has less than zero to do with it. If you need to do that to fulfill your dreams then that is what you should consider whether you are 20 or 80. Only you can determine how your relationship will be affected. For some people, it would be disaster, for other, it will be a nice change of pace and a way to grow individually while renewing your love for each other.

Let’s say your program takes for years. How old will you be when you finish if you do it? How old will you be when you finish if you don’t do it?

3

Hi SPoons, congratulations for being open to new possibilities and to improving yourself. It’s never too late to learn. Here are a few things to chew over in making your decision.

First I assume that there are no young children in the equation? That would be my first concern. Young kids need to have their dad around, I think.

Barring that, you have to consider how you would feel being appart from your wife for so long, how often you could still see each other, and what that would do to your relationship. My wife and I were apart for one year, when she did a fellowship, and I didn’t exactly enjoy it. I wasn’t completely miserable, but I became a bit of a workaholic, and missed her terribly, even if we spoke everyday. I was in Ottawa, and she was in Edmonton, about a 4.5 hr flight. We saw each other about every 2 months or so between private trips, business trip, and hollidays. We decided after that to never again be apart so long.

Here’s another loaded question, which you should consider. It may be a non-issue. I don’t mean to suggest anything about you, because I don’t know you. (Too much Candian apologising here, excuse me…) You are going to be away from your wife for a prolonged period of time,almost certaily somewhat lonely, and depending on your field of study, possibly working long hours with young lady students who may find the confidence and life-experience of an older man attractive. (If you go into Comp-Sci or Elec. Eng, this maybe less of a factor than if you’re doing an MBA or lawschool :stuck_out_tongue: ) You have to ask yourself, honestly now, if you can withstand this test on your marriage. In my case, I was working in the networking field (data, not people) and this wasn’t an issue, and I have complete confidence in my wife on this front. But university has a different environment than business or hospitals. There are lots of parties and lots of alcohol floating around. So just something to think about a bit…

A much more pragmatic consideration is the financial one. The cost of driving / taking the buss from your own house to shool is much cheaper than separate rent & food at a remote campus. I assume you will be foregoing your own income during this time, so you may want to take out the calculator and look at the two scenarios from a money perspective. You have to trade that off with the urgency / opportunity cost of delaying the degree. Once you pass the big four-oh, things like this take on a new urgency.

Good Luck!
(Just out of personal curiosity, what is your considered field of study?)

4

If you do it, expect to feel sometimes like a triangular peg in a square hole. It’s “normal” to go to professional school fresh out of college. It is “usual” to go to professional school 5 years out of college when you figure out what your really want to do in life. It is “common” to go back to school at 40 or 50 if you are female and your kids are about to be out on their own.

None of these describe you. Though, one should not take the words in quotes too seriously as judgements of how frequently people behave in these manners.
Also, not being just like everyone else is not the end of the world. Your life experiences and conviction that this is what you want to do may well give you other advantages over some of the more frequent types of students you will encounter.
I’m in library school right now, and some of my classmates drive up to three hours each direction to take classes. (Most drive much shorter distances than that, but there are a few who schedule their classes so they drive up one day, spend the night at a motel or someone’s apartment, and drive back the next). It strikes me that you might well benefit more from your classes if you did just relocate yourself for the semester and didn’t have as much travel stress to deal with.

On the other hand, long time long distance separations can be tough on marriages, even just from the perspective of not having that person there to talk to, eat dinner with, etc. I know from observing my mother, who has done a fair amount of travelling the last few years to deal with her aging mother, new grandchild, etc. Long distance support is just not the same as being there in person.

Finally, although I’ll admit I know nothing about it, I wonder if applying to more schools than just the one in your city might not make you look more appealing to the local school. “Hey, Here’s a guy who’s forty and willing to move to pursue his degree. He must be serious.” as opposed to the potentially flaky guy who is applying to the school on a whim because it is there and classes would be accessible.

5

What would you think about delaying the decision about moving for a bit?

The schools that I’m familiar with will let you take a few classes (like exactly two) without being enrolled in the program.

So (depending on the lead time required for enrollment) you could do something like this:

  1. Apply to your local university. If you get accepted, all well and good.
  2. If not, enroll in one or two classes anyway. This has the triple benefit of: a) easing you back into the “school-homework-study” mode, b) getting you access to some faculty members, who can influence acceptance decisions, and c) if you do well in the classes, you’ve now got a better case to be accepted the next time you apply.
  3. Reapply at your local university and some other schools at the same time. If you’ve played your cards right, you now have a better shot at being accepted at all the schools you applied to.

And, finally, another question: do you have an idea on the differences between your hometown program and the ones farther away? In other words: is there a particular one that is more or less prestigious thatn the others? Does one of them offer a subspecialty that you’re interested in? Are there different costs? In other words, if location was not a consideration, which school would you go to? Or do you care?

6

Congratulations, Spoons! And kudos to MrsSpoons as well!

I think you should go for it. I’ll be cheering you on. (And if you come to somewhere near Toronto, I’ll come over and we can have long bizarre philosophical discussions at 2AM about the whichness of what and how many electrons fit on the head of a pin. :slight_smile: )

I can vouch for this. I tried going to animation school when I was 29 and all the other students were 18 to 23ish. I felt quite apart from them at times. OTOH, I ended up with one very good friend, and I also went out with one of the girls in the class for a while. It didn’t last, but that was due to philosophical differences and my cluelessness about emotional connection, rather than the age difference itself.

I can only presume that the feeling of apartness would be greater with greater difference in age. The logical step to cure this would be to find more people in their forties to go back to school with.

If you find any of these, could you send them my way? :slight_smile:

You’d have to look at the financial part, of course. Going back as a Mature Student may change your options. Can you get a student loan as a Mature Student? On the other hand, can you finance your course through home equity?

What cities are you looking at going to? What program?

7

Another thing I just thought of–it might be a good idea to start a physical exercise program now if you don’t already do it. I understand that many programs can be very stressful; exercise helps build stamina and fight stress, and every resource you have on your side helps.