Gone Back to School at 36: Almost 38, Working Full-Time, and Back at University

So, here I am; a grown-ass adult (questionable at times) at almost 38 years of age (in a couple months), and I'm a student at a Public 4-year University with a bunch of 18-22 year olds that I feel SO out of place around.

Actually, I've been trying to complete my bachelor's degree for a damn long time. This isn't really a story about someone who randomly decided at 37 that maybe they should go back to school. I've been trying to finish this bachelor's degree for almost a decade now, and there have been a ridiculous number of detours, interruptions, life changes, and general “well, what the fuck do I do now?” moments along the way.

I originally graduated from ITT Technical Institute in 2014 with an Associate of Applied Science in Networking Systems Administration. I had actually started working toward a bachelor's degree there, too. At the time, I was in their Project Management program because the Cybersecurity program hadn't started yet. They ended up starting the cybersecurity classes about a quarter before I graduated with my associate degree, so I never really had the opportunity to switch over and pursue that bachelor's through ITT.

Then 2015 happened, and I lost my dad after his four-year battle with ALS. I never took time off from school because of it. I kept going to classes and working through everything while dealing with losing him. Then, in 2016, ITT Tech got shut down after the federal government took action against the school over fraud and other misconduct. So, yeah. There went that plan.

After that, I tried like hell to get into IT with the degree I already had. I applied for jobs, tried to get my foot in the door, and did pretty much everything I could think of to get that first real opportunity. It didn't happen. I had exactly one interview for an IT position during that entire period. One. Eventually, I went back to the kinds of jobs I could actually get hired for: customer service, call centers, retail, and other customer-facing work. None of that was necessarily what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing, but bills don't exactly give a shit about your five-year plan.

I didn't completely give up on the bachelor's degree, though. In 2017, I started working toward it through Western Governors University. That first year ended up being a pretty significant period of my life for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with school. I got married and became a stepfather to a preschool-aged girl and a toddler boy. From the beginning, I had planned to adopt them because their biological father wasn't involved in their lives and had never even met his son. We spent a little while longer together in Missouri before ultimately deciding to move to Oregon as a family in May 2018.

Then, less than a year after we moved here, that whole life fell apart. On our two-year anniversary, to the day, my former wife left Oregon on a plane with the kids to move back to Missouri, and we eventually divorced. Around that same time, I was working in caregiving and Direct Support Professional roles, and somewhere in the middle of everything going on, my classes at WGU stopped, too. At that point, finishing the bachelor's degree just wasn't where my life was headed anymore. I had to work, keep a roof over my head, and deal with a whole lot of other shit that was suddenly a hell of a lot more important than school.

Then 2020 happened.

COVID shut down a huge portion of the world, travel stopped, stay-at-home orders became normal, and pretty much everybody had to figure out how to function in a world that had suddenly changed underneath them. For me, though, the whole “survival mode” thing didn't really end when things started opening back up. A lot of the years since then have still been about surviving financially, keeping a roof over my head, working, paying bills, dealing with whatever life decided to throw at me next, and trying to keep moving forward somehow.

And honestly, we're still very much in that position. I'm working full-time, I'm still trying to improve my financial situation, and I'm still trying to get into an IT career that will actually give me more stability and some breathing room. I'm hopeful that we're finally getting close to a point where the financial side of survival can ease up a little, especially if I can get some additional income coming in through a better-paying job. That's a huge part of why getting back into IT and finishing this degree matter so much to me now.

Last year, I finally got to the point where I realized I was probably going to have to go back to school if I wanted to get myself where I actually wanted to be. It wasn't because I suddenly decided I needed another degree just for the sake of having one. I was looking at the economy, the job market, my existing IT education, how much technology had changed since I originally went to school, and the kind of life I actually want for myself. I couldn't keep assuming that an older degree and everything I'd taught myself over the years were somehow going to magically get me where I wanted to go.

If I wanted a real shot at building an IT career and actually having some control over where my life goes, I needed to finish the bachelor's degree and refresh my technical knowledge while I was doing it.

So, I tried again.

This time, I started online at Southern New Hampshire University. I had left WGU with poor SAP standing, which meant I'd have had to pay for an entire semester out of pocket before I could get financial aid back. I couldn't afford that, so SNHU seemed like the most realistic option at the time. It also taught me something pretty quickly: online classes aren't necessarily the right fit for me.

I can absolutely learn online. That's not really the issue. I found that I do better when there's actual structure around me, instructors I can interact with, and some level of physical connection to the educational environment. I need more than just logging into a course shell and being expected to independently manage every aspect of the experience. I can do it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's where I'm going to do my best.

After the fall semester, I transferred again and spent the summer semester at Mt. Hood Community College. That's where I ran into a completely different problem: advising. The advising experience was, frankly, terrible. I had a hard time getting clear information about which classes I needed and how they actually fit into the pathway I was trying to build. I ended up taking a math class that I came dangerously close to failing, which was a first for me. I've never failed a class before, and I'd never even been held back academically.

That experience made me step back and seriously reconsider where I was going to finish this degree. That's when I started looking at Western Oregon University, and I ended up transferring there in Fall 2025. For the first time in a while, I felt like I'd found a university where I could actually make this work.

Then January 2026 happened.

We moved, and the move happened during the exact same week that the Winter 2026 semester was starting. At the time, I was also working two jobs, trying to keep up with everything at home, and attempting to make it to classes. I couldn't keep up with all of it. Rather than continue trying to force everything to work when it clearly wasn't, I made the decision to take a medical withdrawal, which essentially put me out for two semesters.

And now here I am.

I'm almost 38 years old, working full-time, getting ready to head back into Fall 2026 classes, and registered for 16 credits. And honestly, I'm pretty damn excited about it.

One of the things I'm especially looking forward to is finally getting into more of the actual Information Systems coursework instead of spending semester after semester grinding through general education requirements. Most of my classes this fall are directly related to IT, including coursework that's much more connected to the career I'm actually trying to build. After everything it took to get back here, that's a pretty damn good feeling. Because this time, I know what I'm working toward.

I'm not going to college because I have no idea what I want to do with my life, and I'm not trying to figure out who I am from scratch. I'm almost 38. I've spent more than twenty years working, and I've worked in customer service, call centers, retail, caregiving, direct support, and technical support. I've had jobs I loved, jobs I hated, jobs that taught me something, and jobs that mostly taught me what I never want to do again.

I know myself a hell of a lot better now. I know what kinds of environments I work well in, what kinds of work drain me, what I want from a career, what I absolutely don't want, and what kind of life I want that career to support. That's a pretty damn important difference between going to college at 18 and going back at almost 38.

I'm not starting over. I'm starting from experience.

Everything I've done over the last 20-some-odd years comes with me. The jobs, the education, the mistakes, the things I've picked up or learned, the things I've had to survive, the things I'm proud of, and even the stuff I wish had gone differently. None of that disappears just because my career path didn't go exactly the way I originally thought it would.

So, yeah. I'm doing this again.

I don't know exactly where I'll end up by the time I graduate. I have a pretty good idea of the direction I'm heading, but I'm realistic enough to know that life has a tendency to throw shit into the road when you least expect it. Maybe I'll end up in cybersecurity. Maybe I'll find myself working in infrastructure or systems. Maybe I'll stumble into some completely different corner of technology that I haven't even considered yet.

For now, I'm going back to school at almost 38, working full-time, trying to build an IT career, working toward getting to Ireland, and figuring out what comes next while I'm actually living it.

After everything it took to get back to this point, I'm pretty damn curious to see where it goes.