How Do I Get There from Here?
For Summer Johnston, earning a bachelor’s degree was not the beginning of her education.
It was the completion of a journey that had stretched across three decades.
Like many adult learners, Summer’s path through higher education did not follow a straight line. College happened alongside work, family, responsibilities, and the many changes that accumulate over a lifetime. Credits were earned at different points along the way. Plans shifted. Life moved forward.
But the goal never entirely disappeared.
When Summer eventually returned to finish her degree, she brought something her younger self could not have possessed: decades of experience and a much clearer understanding of why completing her education mattered.
Still, returning as an adult could sometimes feel isolating.
Traditional college environments are often built around assumptions about who a student is and what a student’s life looks like. Adult learners may walk onto a campus—or enter a classroom online—and struggle to see themselves reflected in the people, programs, and messages surrounding them.
Summer understood that feeling.
“We were not behind, we were simply on a different path.”
That realization changed more than how she thought about her own journey. It shaped how she began thinking about other adult learners.
Summer helped create a support group where adult students could connect with one another and recognize that they were not navigating college alone. What began with her own experience of feeling unseen became a desire to make the path more visible for the people coming behind her.
“Advocacy does not always begin with a position or a paycheck. Sometimes it begins with a promise you make to yourself while walking across campus, feeling invisible.”
At 49, Summer earned her bachelor’s degree.
The accomplishment represented far more than the credits she had accumulated over the years. Finishing changed the way she understood her own story—and helped her see a new direction for what might come next.
Her experience as an adult learner had shown her how much seemingly small interactions can matter. A person who answers a question. Someone who understands why a working adult cannot simply rearrange an entire life around an institutional schedule. An advisor who recognizes that a winding educational path is not evidence of a lack of commitment.
Sometimes what a learner needs most is another person who recognizes that they belong.
“I know the difference one person can make when they simply say, ‘I see you. Keep going.’”
Summer began imagining herself becoming that person for someone else.
After years working as an accounting professional, she found herself drawn toward academic advising and the possibility of using her own experience to help other students navigate higher education. Her degree had helped her finish one long-held goal while opening the possibility of an entirely different kind of work.
“I believe deeply that education can change lives because it changed mine.”
Summer’s journey offers a different way of thinking about an educational path that takes thirty years to complete.
The years between the first credit and the last were not empty space. They contained careers, relationships, responsibilities, setbacks, growth, and learning that no transcript could fully capture.
She was not behind.
She was becoming the person who would eventually return to finish.
And now, the experience of finding her own way through higher education has given Summer a new sense of where she wants to go.
“Even if the path is uncertain, even if the doors do not open right away, I know where I am headed. And this time, I am not walking alone.”
Summer Johnston is one of fifty adult learners featured in Beyond the Degree: Stories of Adult Learner Comebacks and What They Teach Us. Read her complete story in her own words, and discover what these remarkable comebacks teach us, in the book from the Center for Academic Innovation.