It Ain't Over (9 page)

Gaylee liked being a graphic artist for the university, and developed a clever method for working with the many departments. “If the Electrical Engineering Department needed a poster,” she says, “I hung around with them for a while to get a feel for what they did.” One day she was asked to develop some materials for the medical school, so she went over to the school to hang out and absorb the vibe. Immediately the visit rekindled her childhood desire to be a doctor. The atmosphere, the subjects, the classes—as sure as Gaylee had ever been about anything, she knew this was where she was meant to be.

What she doubted, however, was that she was at the right moment of her life to go there. By now she was the mother of two small children, her husband was launching his law career, her mother’s health was still fragile. No, she decided, this was not the time.

The dream may have been deferred, but it would not be denied. It stuck with her. Finally, she began to share her feelings with her friends and family. The reaction was unanimous: “Do it!” they said.

But
could
she do it? Her doubts persisted. She would have to attend four years of medical school, followed by two years of an internship and two years of a residency, before she would be allowed to practice medicine—and all of
that
after
she had successfully completed 42 hours of undergraduate course work in math and science.

Then she had an epiphany. “I’m going to be 50 someday anyway,” Gaylee thought. “I may as well be 50 and be a doctor. If I don’t do this now, I will always regret it.”

The road wasn’t easy—“calculus almost killed me”—but at age 42, Gaylee was accepted to medical school at Case Western. It didn’t hurt that she had designed the school’s brochures years before, or that the school had a strong belief in admitting “untraditional” students—namely, people who were older or who had prepared differently for the program. She was one of five students in her class who were over forty. All were women. All passed.

At one point in her cardiovascular class, Gaylee studied herself into what she thought was a heart attack. It turned out to be a
panic
attack, not uncommon for stressed-out med students.

And then there was the weirdness: At one student party, Gaylee looked up and was surprised to see her 21-year-old son—who was visiting—kissing one of her classmates, who was around 25 and thought he was Gaylee’s brother. “Everyone had a good laugh,” she recalls.

Gaylee graduated from medical school when she was 47. Whatever difficulties she faced along the way, being older was not
among them. In fact, she believes that her age was a positive. Her children were old enough not only to support her decision, but to step up and take responsibility for managing the household so she could concentrate on her studies.

Moreover, Gaylee saw that her accumulation of life experiences helped her keep perspective and manage the challenges of med school in ways the younger students could not.

“Hey, my husband and I lost all of our worldly possessions in a fire while we were undergraduates,” she says. “Once you get through something like that, being assigned to read a couple hundred pages by next Wednesday isn’t something that’s going to freak you out.”

Most important, from the moment she entered med school, Gaylee was bolstered by the conviction that she was meant to be a doctor. Today, as an internist practicing antiaging medicine, she sees a through-line connecting her experiences.

“From taking care of my mother to being a mother, everything I’ve done has helped prepare me for this life,” she says. “I was meant to be a healer.”

“I started to realize that perhaps ‘settled down’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Maria Figueroa, 52

Fort Myers, Florida

E
very time Maria Figueroa pushed her cart of cleaning supplies into an office, she’d play out a fantasy in her mind. An immigrant from Peru, Maria was working as a bank janitor—the latest in a series of menial jobs she’d held over the years—but in her dreams, she was a professional.

“As I went about my work, I’d imagine myself sitting behind one of those big desks as a manager. That’s where I wanted to be, not cleaning,” says Maria, who often had to bring her then-ten-year-old daughter, Melissa, with her on her evening rounds. “I would sit Melissa down and say, ‘This is why you need to study hard, so that you can have an office like this one day, not a job like Mommy is doing.’ And she would say, ‘I promise, Mommy, I will.’ ”

As a child in Peru, Maria had been a dedicated student. Schoolwork, especially math, came naturally to her, and she always brought home good grades. When she was a teenager, her father, a college-educated high school teacher, told her, “I don’t have enough money to send you to private
university, but you’ve got to continue your education. If you earn your degree, that will be yours forever.”

So in 1980, Maria enrolled at one of Peru’s free public universities, studying accounting.

“I had a godmother who was an accountant, and I used to beg to visit her at work. She would joke, ‘Okay, you can visit, but I’m going to put you to work for me!’ She had three boys, and I remember that even after she lost her husband, she never had any worries about providing for them on her own. That taught me a lot about what having a profession could mean.”

But two years after Maria started college, the Peruvian government, facing economic problems and a violent guerrilla insurgency, began shutting down its public universities, including the one Maria attended.

“At first, they said the schools would be closed for just a few months, but it turned out to be years,” says Maria, who found secretarial work at city hall while she waited to resume her studies. When the university finally reopened in 1985, Maria was devastated to learn that all of her academic records had been lost.
That’s two years of my life just thrown away.

Maria decided to take some time to consider her options. “My grandparents were living in New Jersey, and my grandfather had just passed away. My grandma needed someone to help her for a while, so I told my parents I would go, and I got a visa.”

Over the next few years in the States, Maria picked up any kind of work she could find: answering phones for her aunt’s mortgage business, babysitting a neighbor’s kids, cleaning offices. Often, the work was part-time or temporary, so she moved around a lot, cobbling together a living. Although she missed her parents desperately, Maria couldn’t imagine returning home. “There were no opportunities for me in Peru that seemed worth going back for.”

In 1993, Maria married a man she’d met through friends in Peru. Americo was a college graduate who had worked as a P.E. teacher in their home country; though he had his green card, his English wasn’t very good, so his opportunities in the States were limited. After they wed, Maria got a green card, too, and three years later Melissa was born. Soon after, she and Americo moved to Florida, both for the weather and for the prospect of better schools for Melissa.

But in Florida, Maria and Americo could find jobs only in a factory making plastic bags. “It was awful,” says Maria. “Florida is so hot in the summer, and I was working in this cramped area with big loud machines and no air-conditioning. I felt like I was in a sauna.”

After a few months, Maria couldn’t take it anymore. She had to find something—anything—else. So once more, she began looking for work anywhere she could find it: housekeeping at a nursing home, cashiering at a local supermarket. She even found a contract job delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service.

“I spent so many years hopping from job to job, and even though some of them were enjoyable, they never felt like something I wanted to do forever,” she says.

Maria often met other immigrants in the same situation—overqualified for the low-skill work they were doing. “But they all seemed to be resigned to it,” she says. “No one ever expressed wanting to move on, to become a professional. But I just couldn’t imagine spending my entire life like this.

“I’d always told Melissa how important it was to get her education, but I had the same goal for myself. I thought that someday I’d finish my studies, but it just never seemed like the right time to go back.”

Then, in 2009, Maria took a job as a pre-K teacher’s aide. A coworker who wanted to improve her English asked Maria to go with her to visit nearby
Hodges University. When they arrived, the admissions officer asked, “Why are you two looking for English classes? Your English is good! You need to come to college and get a degree!”

“As soon as she said that,” Maria says, “I got excited. I thought,
Maybe now is the time.
” Melissa was just starting high school, and Americo had recently been promoted from head custodian to building supervisor at his school, which meant he could be home when Melissa got out of school every day.

The admissions officer told Maria and her friend that they’d need to come back and take an entrance exam, similar to the SAT. The following week, Maria arrived ready for the test, but her friend never showed. “I think she was scared,” says Maria, who admits she was a little intimidated herself. “The test was three hours long, and every hour that passed, my headache grew bigger and bigger. I was freaking out, thinking,
I should have studied more! I can’t remember anything from my time at the university all those years ago!
”

The most challenging part of the test was the essay. The topic: Why do you want to go back to school? “I wrote about how I wanted to be an example for Melissa,” says Maria. “I wrote, ‘If I can show her that
I
can do this, she will see that she can do it, too.’ It was the first time I’d ever really expressed this goal for myself out loud, other than to my husband.”

A few days later, Maria got a phone call—she’d passed.

“I couldn’t believe it! Just about every night since I had left college all those years ago, I had dreamed that I was back in a classroom with my old classmates from Peru,” she says. “Now, in just a few months, my dream would be real.”

In January 2010, Maria started an associate’s degree program in accounting, taking classes in the evening while continuing to work as a teacher’s aide.
(A financial aid package covered most of her tuition and books; loans took care of the rest.) “The first day, I was giddy,” she says. “I thought,
This time, nothing will keep me from finishing.
”

Still, balancing her job, studies, and home life was often exhausting. “I would work from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., then do my homework in the afternoon. My classes usually started at six p.m., and I’d get home around ten.” Although her classes met only two or three nights a week, “I’d lie to my family and say I had class every night. I can’t get anything done at home—there’s always someone who needs me to do something for them—so I was able to spend my off-nights studying on campus.”

Maria’s favorite classes were those in accounting, where she consistently earned As. “I already had a strong foundation from my time at university in Peru, and I felt like,
I can do this! I understand!
” she says. “I’m even able to help a lot of my classmates, which is a good feeling.”

Other classes, like English composition, were tougher. “I explained to the professor, ‘I have my ideas, but I get blocked when I try to put them down on paper. I still think in Spanish, and it’s hard for me to switch over and write in English.’ The professor was from Russia, so she understood, but she told me, ‘You need to forget Spanish when you’re in my class.’ ” Maria got a tutor, and ended up getting a C, “but I didn’t care. When I saw the grade, I was so relieved: I passed.”

In the fall of 2013, Maria completed the last two classes she needed to finally earn her associate’s degree. But she isn’t done. “All along, my goal was to get a bachelor’s degree. I can’t imagine stopping now.”

Maria knows that in finishing her degree, she’s proven something to herself—and to her daughter, who joined her mom as a college student, enrolling at Florida Gulf University after graduating summa cum laude from her high school last spring.