Final Day of Class

Marcus wrote a post on his blog about going to his final day of class today for his bachelor's degree and all the time, work, and money that has gone in to making this time of our life possible. We have been talking a lot about the whole experience lately and I just wanted to write down some of the things we have talked about. Maybe one day if our kids get as frustrated with how hard schooling can be as we found ourselves feeling at one point they can read this and know that we've been there, but made it through.

It was 12 years ago that Marcus first started working towards his bachelors degree and nearly 7 since I started working on mine. Of course, neither one of us has actually been in school that long, we both had "time off" periods. When we first got married we were both in that state (with exception of a few random online classes that Marcus was attempting). It didn't take long after being married for the two of us to decide that graduating from college was something we absolutely had to choose to do, no matter what sacrifices it meant we would need to make.

I vividly remember the day Marcus came home from UVSC after meeting with the Exercise Science department head three years ago. He found out he had more classes left to take then he thought and discovered he would also have to fork out over $5,000 per semester the first year just to cover out-of-state tuition and fees. We definitely did not have that type of money just lying around and felt totally discouraged. After a few minutes of moping we decided feeling defeated would do us no good and we decided to find a way to make it happen. Marcus and I spent a lot of time working over-time that summer and fall and lived on a tight budget.

Once Connor came along the challenges increased but so did the desire to succeed. In fact, it was around that time that Marcus and I both decided that we wanted to go to graduate school. It was the first time either of us saw that potential in ourselves.

Now, here we are, three years after that initial decision was made and we are done with classes (but not finals quite yet). Marcus has spent a combined total of 100 hours a week working two jobs and attending school. And surprisingly enough, we both still feel like we have been able to spend a lot of time together growing and strengthening our little family. We have actually enjoyed classes and some of them have been highlights in our lives. Neither one of us feel that we would trade these years for anything, and as hard as they've been, we strongly feel they would have been even harder if we weren't doing what we knew we needed to do. We know our educations will pay off in many ways for the rest of our lives. And although we're leaving this stage dirt-poor financially, we're richly blessed with the satisfaction of knowing we worked hard to make this happen and actually got it done!

Thank you to all our family members and friends who have been supportive and encouraging to us as we've done this! And thank you to Grandma Olson for the tremendous guilt trip that kept me going...I might have dropped out without it.