SCC graduate celebrates culmination of long journey

SYLVA – Early in her commencement remarks to Southwestern Community College's class of 2001, Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue said, "Today is the tomorrow you've been waiting so long for."

Those words rang especially true in the ears of 51-year old Barbara Austin, who sat among the more than 250 graduates who assembled for Southwestern Community College's graduation ceremony on Friday, May 11.

A 1967 graduate of Sylva-Webster High School, Austin had waited more than 30 years for this night, this degree.

"I feel great," she said, moments before the ceremony began. "It's the end of one part of my life, and the beginning of another."

Marrying at a young age, raising two children and working at a local manufacturing company all contributed to Austin's delayed entrance into college. But when the Chasam plant in Sylva closed down in December of 1998, the doors of opportunity finally swung wide open for her. As part of her severance package, she was offered the chance to attend college and earn a degree.

So she jumped at it.

"I felt like it was a good opportunity to do what I had intended to years ago," she said. "And the Office Systems Technology program seemed like a good one for me. I had always been interested in computers. I didn't know much about them, but I was curious. I realized that in the future, you're going to have to know something about computers."

Excited as she may have been about her chosen academic field and finally continuing her education, she had a long ways to travel before she could walk across the Myers Auditorium stage and obtain her degree. The last time she set foot in a classroom, Lyndon B. Johnson was president and man had not yet walked on the moon.

By the time she embarked on her own college career, both of her children had already completed their college education and provided her with two grandchildren. Fear tugged at her heart the first day she walked across campus and into a class at SCC. Those nerves didn't disappear anytime soon, she recalled.

"Everything I remembered and knew about school had changed so much - even since my kids were in school," she said. "In most of my classes, I was the oldest one. Sometimes I was even older than my teachers."

While she spent considerable time worrying about what she called "the age problem," most of her classmates hardly noticed.

"If I didn't say anything about how old I am, a lot of people just thought I was the same age as them. When we'd get to talking, it would turn out that I had gone to high school with a lot of their mothers," she said as a smile formed on her face, eventually giving way to laughter. She then paused for a second and added, "It's kind of funny looking back at it now. But at the time, I was just plain scared."

Austin's apprehension about being able to remember how to learn after being out of school for so long nearly caused her to bail out early on. But her husband Keldon wouldn't let her.

"That first year, when I was taking all the general education classes, I realized I had to complete 70-something hours before I could get my degree," she recalled. "About that time, 70 hours seemed like a lot of credits. But every time I'd start saying a job was looking better to me than school, my husband would say, 'you've come this far, now. You need to finish.'"

So, Austin pressed on toward her degree. She also found encouragement from her program's coordinator, Linda Talbott as well as a co-worker from Chasam named Valerie Welch.

"Linda has just been a great instructor," said Austin, who eventually overcame her concerns to the point where she took on the responsibility of being the student editor for 'The Milestone" - SCC's annual arts and literature magazine. "Linda is someone that you know you can talk to about things. I always knew she was on my side. She listened to me and supported me."

With all her fears conquered, Austin prepared to walk into Myers Auditorium and accept that degree she waited so long to get. But one last thing flashed in her mind before the ceremony.

"I heard a lot of rumors when I first started here," she said. "People were saying I was too old, and that I don't need to be doing this. Now, when I have that degree in my hand, I can say I have proved a point."

And no one can ever take that away.