Going to University at 55

August van Stralen never graduated from university. In 2024, at age 55, she decided it was time.

August lives in Princeton, BC, a town of 3000 people. As you might expect, there’s no university. August wanted to pursue creative writing, so she had to look online. None of the Canadian schools offered exactly what she wanted — a program focused entirely on creative writing, with none of the mandatory electives of a regular undergraduate degree. At her age, she figured she didn’t need to take Introduction to Chemistry.

With her wife’s support, she found the perfect program at Falmouth University in Cornwall, England: Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, fully online. The cost was a little scary, since she wouldn’t be eligible for Canadian student loans, but the couple figured out how to swing it. The main problem? The United Kingdom is in a different time zone, eight hours ahead of BC. Since she works full time, the time difference made the summer information sessions hard to join. She did manage to attend a session during a holiday, however.

I spoke to her twice, once just before the program began, and then again after the end of the first semester.

“I’ve always felt that I wasn’t smart enough for things,” she tells me in our first conversation. After high school, she took a year at a college for transfer credit to a university program. She planned to become a teacher.”I didn’t really fit into the college mentality.

“I had a great creative writing class when I was in college,” she recalls, “but that was the only thing that was great. And I think part of what made it great was I became friends with three other women who were like 10, 20, 30 years older than me. And to get their experiences was different.”

August has written plenty of stories and poems. She’s taken many workshops and courses outside of postsecondary institutions. She’s an experienced writer. What does this program give her that she doesn’t already have?

“Confidence,” she says. “And it’s also going to give me discipline because it’s going to force me to organize my time.

“One of the things that I am kind of sheepish about at conferences is when people ask me, ‘Well, what’s your education?’ And I say, ‘None.’ It doesn’t feel good. And I know that there are people that have been published without any sort of education. But in general, people kind of look and say, ‘Oh, okay.’” Having a university degree may provide a kind of social standing not afforded to everyone.

Another major benefit is exposure to writing and writers that she might not otherwise encounter. She’s eager to grow her own writer community.

The other students are much younger than her, which can affect their ability to provide feedback on one another’s creative writing. “Most of my classmates are either out of high school or in their early twenties and just, like, baby writers. I’m excited to see if we stick together throughout the three years, how much they change. That’d be interesting.”

“I’ll change too,” she predicts. When I ask her how she expects to change, she says she hopes to become “more proud of who I am.”

For many people, university life is more than the classes, even when you’re doing it online. “I signed up to be a student rep because I wanted to get the whole university experience.”

Initially, August was nervous about going into a new environment as a queer person. At the end of her first semester, I asked her about that experience.

She says she was pleasantly surprised to find many of her fellow students were also queer. “They either have used they/them pronouns or they’re poly or ace or bi or whatever. And they’re all very open about it. So yeah, definitely not an issue at all.”

“We are all diverse,” she adds. “There’s nothing that’s completely rigid about any part of us. This generation is just the first generation to say, ‘Hey, be who you are.’”

August encourages anyone else her age to take the leap into a university program “Do it. If it’s something that you’re interested in, think about doing it part-time like I’m doing.”

She believes even someone with a full-time job, like herself, can make it work, as long as it’s something they are passionate about. “It shouldn’t feel like a chore. It should be something that you look forward to.” As for August, she will stick with creative writing for the long haul, no matter what. This university program is one step along her lifelong journey. She looks forward to the future. “I want to still be writing when I’m 90.”

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