Yesterday’s Tomorrow
By the time LaKechia Greer returned to college, she had already built the kind of professional experience that demonstrated what she could do.
She was leading inspections, training staff, managing operations, and taking on responsibilities that reflected years of accumulated knowledge and skill. She had an associate degree and extensive experience in her field.
Yet when she looked toward the next level of her career, she encountered a familiar barrier.
The positions she wanted required a bachelor’s degree.
“I had long been qualified by experience but constrained by credentials.”
For LaKechia, that realization reframed the decision to return to school. She was not going back because she lacked professional capability. She was going back because the absence of a credential was limiting where that capability could take her.
She enrolled at the University of Memphis and began working toward the degree that had become increasingly important to her future.
Returning as an adult meant bringing a very different perspective to the classroom than she would have had years earlier. LaKechia already understood responsibility, leadership, and the demands of the workplace. Education was no longer an abstract preparation for a career. She could connect what she was learning directly to work she was already doing.
She also understood that earning the degree would not magically transform her career.
“A degree is not a magic piece of paper that guarantees a job, but it can open doors that might otherwise remain closed.”
That distinction is central to LaKechia’s story.
Adult learners often return to college with significant knowledge and experience already in place. The credential does not create everything they know. Sometimes its value lies in making opportunities accessible that were previously closed to them.
But deciding to return and actually completing a degree are two different things.
There are work responsibilities to manage, assignments to finish, competing demands on time, and moments when continuing can feel much harder than stopping. Waiting until life becomes less complicated can be tempting.
LaKechia learned not to wait.
“Do not wait for the perfect time to return because that rarely comes.”
Instead, she focused on continuing forward, even when the circumstances were not ideal. Her advice to other adults considering education reflects an understanding that persistence is rarely about having a perfectly clear path. It is about staying connected to the reason you began.
“It will not be easy. There will be moments when you question your decision. Please stay committed and keep your eyes on the finish line.”
Her story also carries a lesson about how we understand time.
For adult learners, the past can become a powerful source of doubt. An unfinished degree, an opportunity missed, or a decision made years earlier can begin to feel permanent. It is easy to look backward and imagine how different life might have been.
LaKechia chooses to look in the other direction.
“Do not dwell on yesterday but focus on tomorrow.”
That is the idea at the heart of her journey.
Yesterday does not disappear. It becomes experience. It becomes knowledge. It becomes part of what an adult learner carries into the classroom and into whatever comes next.
The future is still being written.
And sometimes the decision to return to school is how tomorrow begins.
LaKechia Greer 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.