For greater than 60 years, Glamour has honored distinctive school ladies throughout the U.S. This yr, we turned our focus to college students enrolled in neighborhood school. Ola Louisa Watson began school at 72 years outdated and was overwhelmed by the know-how expertise required. She buckled down, and now she’s an honors scholar on her option to a four-year college.
On her first day of school, Ola Louisa Watson introduced a clipboard. How else would she take notes throughout class and ensure vital paperwork, like parking directions and instructions, had been seen always? “All people on campus—all the youngsters—thought I used to be an administrator as a result of I used to be carrying that clipboard,” Watson tells me over Zoom.
She laughs about it now however admits the clipboard was only one piece of an awesome technological impediment course she needed to navigate so as to assimilate and excel as a university scholar when she enrolled at Horry-Georgetown Technical Faculty in Conway, South Carolina, in 2019, at 72 years outdated. She articulated this specific problem finest in her software to turn out to be one of Glamour’s Faculty Ladies of the Yr, explaining that she’d taken a refresher course on Phrase and Excel earlier than college began so she thought she’d be good to go.
“WRONG!” she wrote. “I used to be confronted with having to function the faculty’s WaveNet software program program and needed to be taught to submit info by way of Dropbox. Inside these first days and weeks, I needed to be taught McGraw Hill’s Join and different software program with assignments and assessments which needed to be accomplished and submitted by way of the web. I needed to be taught to make use of a TI-84 calculator, I needed to create PowerPoint shows, entry and use e-books, I needed to make and submit movies for assignments, study WiFi.” And this was earlier than COVID-19 hit and a complete new set of technological challenges materialized.
“Once I graduated highschool, I’d thought somewhat bit about school however simply couldn't get it collectively. What I wished to do was get married.”
Lots of people her age—most, possibly?—would have thrown within the towel and retreated into the very full and cozy life they’d constructed. Why hassle with the mind-melting tedium of mastering a TI-84 when you may get pleasure from your two grown daughters and two grandsons, the fruits of a 40-year profession spent working with in-need moms and kids, your fantastic husband with whom you’ve simply celebrated your fifty fifth marriage ceremony anniversary, your property on beachside Pawleys Island (“because the crow flies, two miles from the Atlantic Ocean!”).
Watson will not be a type of folks. Though larger training didn’t turn out to be official till her seventh decade, college and studying has at all times figured prominently in her life.
One Watson’s clearest reminiscences from her childhood in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was routinely having to cease what she was doing and conceal beneath her desk in elementary college in case as we speak was the day the atom bomb dropped.
“It was known as duck and canopy,” she says, laughing on the quaint concept that crouching down and masking one’s head may defend from a nuclear assault. However this was the early Fifties, a time when Chilly Battle anxiousness was at an all-time excessive, particularly in Fayetteville, whose proximity to the most important army base on the planet, Fort Bragg, was important. Additionally important: the overwhelming variety of military-adjacent kids dwelling within the metropolis throughout these years. So many who Watson and her classmates needed to go to highschool on break up schedules. “A few of us went within the morning, then after Christmas to June you went within the afternoons,” she says. When she moved to Charlotte in fourth grade together with her household, not solely did the duck-and-cover drills begin to wane however she was capable of resume life as an everyday full-time elementary college scholar.
scholar, she says, right through highschool. For a lot of feminine child boomers, attending a four-year school wasn’t extraordinary, nevertheless it wasn’t on the high of Watson’s to-do checklist, both. “Once I graduated highschool, I’d thought somewhat bit about it however simply couldn’t get it collectively,” Watson says. “What I wished to do was get married. I fell in love once I was 12 years outdated and by no means wavered from that boy.”
Watson graduated at age 73 with an affiliate of arts diploma in Could. She is a member of Phi Theta Kappa. She’s been accepted at Coastal Carolina College to proceed her training. She has an internship lined up for July.
It was her mother and father who pushed her to pursue some kind of persevering with training. “I’ll always remember my mom saying, ‘Dave’—speaking about my boyfriend—‘is from an exquisite household. And it in all probability gained’t ever be an issue, however it is advisable to know the best way to help your self.’”
And so off she went to an all-girls secretarial college, visions of Della Avenue looming (“You in all probability gained’t know who that’s,” she tells me, “until you watched Perry Mason.”) After a yr Watson turned an government secretary, however Della Avenue she was not. So she received married in 1966 and, whereas she loved her first few jobs, two child ladies got here rapidly.
Then, in 1973, a chance got here her option to work for Florence Crittenton Companies, a historic company established in 1896 as a house for younger ladies in disaster. Watson discovered working with at-risk moms and their kids to be so fulfilling that she spent 40 years in its Charlotte chapter, now known as Crittenton Companies of North Carolina, and credit this job—one throughout which she met mentors who she says taught her about neighborhood volunteerism, methods to make an efficient political influence, and the best way to get issues finished in an moral, accountable method—as piquing her curiosity in lastly, formally, going to school.
Nonetheless, it was a gradual course of. She achieved varied certifications over time earlier than enrolling at Horry-Georgetown. And this time, getting it collectively could be an understatement. Regardless of the technological snafus and the crush of COVID, which pressured her to transform her house den right into a classroom, carve out house in her storage for a makeshift science lab, and determine the best way to observe courses and assignments on-line, Watson graduated at 73 years outdated with an affiliate of arts diploma in Could. She is a member of honor society Phi Theta Kappa, and she or he’s been accepted at Coastal Carolina College to proceed her training. The plan? To earn a B.A. in interdisciplinary research with a political science focus and the purpose of being the perfect volunteer she could be. She has an internship lined up for July.
As our Zoom wraps up, Watson—Southern to the core—invitations me to cease by if I ever discover myself in South Carolina but additionally makes it clear that age shouldn’t ever be a barrier to training. “Make the choice to start out. When you discover out it’s not for you, you haven’t misplaced a complete lot. Any expertise you have got goes to counterpoint your life.”
Perrie Samotin is Glamour’s digital director
