Listen for an abbreviated glimpse into Day's journey back to school:
Suzy Day just can’t
seem to get away from the University of Missouri.
She first became a
Tiger in 2002, when she enrolled as a freshman in the College of Agriculture,
Food and Natural Resources as an environmental design/interior design major.
That didn’t last long, she said.
“At that point, I was
also helping a friend back at home who was in community college nursing, and I
was helping her with all of her homework,” she said. “I was like, ‘I could do
nursing and then I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a job.’ At the same
time, I was having a hard time in my classes because in design, the grade is
based subjectively versus objectively.”
Thus began her time
as a nursing major. She said she wasn’t very passionate about the major, but
she was happy she was almost guaranteed a job post-graduation. She was pursuing
the nursing degree while she served as the Kappa Delta sorority president, and she
said the latter took precedence.
“I cared a lot more
about that then I did about class,” Day said. “I eventually failed out of class
because I just stopped going. I think I probably could have done really well in
it had I tried more.”
No longer a nursing
major, Day eventually graduated a year later with a Women’s and Gender Studies
major, something she said piqued her interest. She was graduating a year
earlier than she anticipated, so she hadn’t lined up a job. The entire next
year Day continued her job as a server at the Heidelberg but she decided to
pursue a higher paying job in 2008.
“I was looking online
and found support staff for social justice almost exactly a year after I
graduated,” she said.
Working in that
position at MU from May 2008 to March 2009, Day became exposed to places on
campus such as the LGBTQ Resource Center and the Women’s Center. In August
2009, she took over as the Women’s Center Adviser.
This year, she
decided it was time to go back to school.
“I never knew if I
wanted to get my master’s, but then the more and more I was out of school (the
more appealing it sounded),” she said. “My mom wanted me to go straight through
school, but I was burned out. I had been in school for five years and I
wouldn’t have appreciated it.”
She is now pursuing a
master’s degree in public affairs, with a specialty in non-profit management.
Picking the degree program was a rigorous process, she said.
“I printed out a list
of all of the master’s programs,” she said. “I didn’t think there were any
master’s programs that were for me. I just started highlighting and crossing
off. I was reading the description of public affairs, which I didn’t even know
existed. It was literally the same thing I had been telling people, so I’m kind
of stuck in it now.”
Graduate school has
been full of decisions thus far, Day said. She said one of the biggest
decisions, however, was the choice to actually enroll in school.
“I get a pretty good
discount for working at the university, so I’ll kick myself in 10 years if I
didn’t get a master’s when I could for super cheap,” she said. “It feels like
you can’t get a job without a master’s anymore. All the jobs I was looking at
online said I had to have a minimum of a master’s so I was like, ‘Oh, crud. I
have to go back to school.’”
The “going back”
process was everything but short, she said. She said her adviser was integral
in getting her to apply for school, because she has been collecting Day’s
application materials since she first decided to apply to graduate school two
years ago.
“It became an ongoing
joke because we kept having meetings and she’s like, ‘You’re only one piece away
from applying,’” Day said. “I kept not doing it. Eventually, she looked at me
and kind of gave me the ‘listen here’ look – ‘I’m going to reserve the spots in
class and I’m going to trust that you’re going to go in and register, pay and
apply to the grad school. It took me a while to get back in there and decide I
was going to do it.”
Being out of the
classroom for so long, Day said the transition back to school has proved to be
quite difficult.
“I probably shouldn’t
have been out for that many years because now I’m kind of out of the loop and I
don’t want to write papers anymore,” she said. “I am not an excellent or even
good writer, and everything in grad school is papers. The first paper I got
back the teacher gave a ton of feedback, like ‘You’ve forgotten how to write a
paper.’ As an undergrad you learn how to write one way, but now I only write in
blurbs from my programming. When you have to go back to citing things, it’s
like, what am I supposed to do?”
There have been other
difficulties, such as balancing her position at the Women’s Center with her
education.
“Social justice doesn’t
quite at five,” she said. “I’ve always had a very fluid schedule in that if a
student needs me after hours or there is programming that doesn’t happen during
the day. Weeks that I have a lot of programming, I don’t get as much studying
done. People are emailing me in class and I’m trying to focus, but I know it’s
an emergency.”
For the time being,
though, she’s making it work.
Story by Jimmy Hibsch, audio by Kelsey Kerwin
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