Some amazing people you'll never hear about

This week I felt like my sister who is a nurse practitioner in a busy clinic up in Boston. she meets all sorts of people with all sorts of problems in her work. With so many vacancies in our office, I’ve picked up a student load again—mostly Sociology, Criminology and Social Work majors and this week I met with some very interesting students. One was a young woman who had started her degree at another university thirteen years ago. She had been one semester short of graduating when she suffered a stroke! She has been steadily working her way back all these years. Her speech is fine, her motor skills seem good. She remarked that her memory is the one thing that doesn’t work too well and that problem sometimes slows her down. Still, you have to admire her perseverance.

Another was a man who was 28 whose dream is join a police force. He does well on the civil service tests, impresses people in interviews and presents himself very well. He is personable, fun to talk with and really seems to have things together. He may have to give up this dream, though, because of some things in his criminal record from his adolescent years. He grew up in foster homes, was convicted of trespassing in his own mother’s yard, convicted of disorderly conduct for shoving someone outside a bar—little stuff, I guess, but it all looms large in a background check. So now he wonders what else he can do with his degree. We’ll talk more in the future, I hope.

Yet another was a young woman who had quit one job at an agency working with mentally retarded adults to take another one in the same field that was closer to home, only to find that the new job is not what she hoped. She remarked that her stomach was upset that day—something she ate, she thought. We went on to talk about a strategy to find a new job, and she shifted in her chair and grimaced as I prattled on about something. We cut the meeting short when I realized she was started to feel worse. The interesting thing about her is that she still came to the appointment, even though she was not feeling well.

Our students are a motivated bunch, I’ll tell you. They’ve had all sorts of life experiences, some that help, some that are obstacles to overcome, and they bring them all to their pursuit of a degree in a place that sometimes seems to thwart their best efforts. We try to be known as a place that helps rather than hinders, that eliminates hurdles rather than creates new ones.