Finishing School

Boy am I glad to have this one crossed off my list! I got pregnant during my junior year in college and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to finish my degree while working full-time and taking care of my premature baby.

Though I had to change my major to do so, I was luckily able to finish a degree and graduate just a year after my baby was born through online education. If finishing school is on your Living To-Do List, don’t give up. Make a plan and follow through. If I could do it, so can you!

Online courses are the best these days. While you have to maintain some discipline to stay on schedule and keep up with the course—teaching much of it to yourself—you can usually do most of your work whenever you’ve got the time—which, for me, was usually at night. My alma mater only had a “general studies” degree available online at the time of my graduation—I had been a secondary education major—but that was a few years ago. Today there are a number of programs and degrees available completely, or almost completely, online. Google your area and “online education” to see if there are any.

And if there aren’t, keep moving forward. You can probably do part of your studies online and part of them on location. See if there are community colleges near you where you can go part-time or to night school. There are also a lot of colleges that will award you credit for things like volunteering or service trips; see if you qualify for any of these. Make sure you take advantage of “testing out” options as well, such as through advanced placement testing. Every credit helps.

If you need a babysitter while you attend school, try swapping services with another student mother or father. You could take turns watching each other’s children while you are not in class. Some campuses may even have babysitting programs for you to take advantage of.

Finally, if you have not graduated from high school, you can still do that too! No matter your age, there are plenty of programs out there to finish school and get a real high school diploma—not just a GED (though that will work fine too!). My sister is just one credit away from getting her diploma from a school she’s been homeschooling from.