Aging student gasps for graduation, sleep

These days I’ve added dark, horizontal half-moons under my eyes as accessories to my wardrobe. They seem – at least in part – to be a result of college experience. And I’m afraid they may be permanent. I’ve been at the college thing off and on for almost 15 years.

Not only will I be over the hill, but older than the hill, when I graduate, at age 42, in May. I will have a total of 187 credits, an associate of science in health information technology, a bachelor of arts in English – and a student loan debt that could cause a stroke. I hope that my education will proportionately raise my earnings as much as the debt for receiving it raises my blood pressure.

I was a young woman when my college odyssey began after several years of cleaning jobs and low-paying clerical positions. Quite often, I’ve worked two part-time jobs concurrently.

School year 1989-90 I attended two semesters as an education major through the University of Augusta’s ITV system in Ellsworth. The offer of a full-time job temporarily interrupted my educational plans.

Three-and-a-half-years and more low-paying, dead-end, unrewarding jobs later, I returned to school in the communications disorders program at the University of Maine, having decided, for the moment, that I wanted to be a speech and language pathologist.

In 1995, I transferred to the health information technology program at University College in Bangor, and graduated in 1997 with an associate’s degree. I worked three years in various health care facilities throughout Down East Maine before I decided to return to UMaine in 2000 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in English.

By that time, I was no spring chicken and worked part time in the radiology department as an aide at Eastern Maine Medical Center. Often, I attended UMaine classes in scrubs.

College, I discovered, wreaks havoc on sleep. A friend ended up in the hospital on the Saturday before final-exams week. I had a big test to study for, but I spent the night at the hospital with my friend. That night I slept all of 20 minutes draped over a table. On the day of the exam, I arrived at school early – in a snowstorm. The half-moons under my eyes may have intensified and my brain functioning might have been at brownout level, but the grade I received was good.

Now, I’m in my final year at UMaine and remain an English major with a double concentration in professional and creative writing. I work part-time as a clerk and reporter for The Weekly at the Bangor Daily News, and was able to use my job as the basis for satisfying a requirement in professional writing during the spring 2003 semester. Recently I started a second part-time job at a local mental-health agency.

This fall I had to take three writing classes. Those classes, combined with producing articles for The Weekly, had me writing in four different styles. At times I’ve gotten the styles confused. My editor, Roxanne Saucier, and fellow reporter, Ardeana Hamlin, sometimes had to bring my articles more in line with journalism to look less like works of fiction or class papers.

My short stories and the book I find myself writing for the creative writing class have sometimes had too many short paragraphs or included too much information too early – elements favored in journalism.

Over the past 31/2 years I have written so many essays, analyses and reaction papers I couldn’t begin to count them. I think I’ve analyzed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” three times for different classes.

Whether the book I’m writing for English 405 ends up a novella or a novel is anyone’s guess. Whether it gets published remains to be seen. But for now I’m a reporter and a registered health information technician – toying with the idea of becoming a novelist.