Betty Sandison finally made her dream come true after 60 years of thinking about it. Betty Sandison just turned 84 a few days ago. To celebrate her 84th year on earth, she graduated from college.
Sandison went to college first in her family. She says, “I grew up on a farm that didn’t have electricity.”
Sandison went to college for the first time in 1955 and got a licence to be a practical nurse from the University of Minnesota. After a year, she ran out of money and decided to go back to school to become a teacher.
But in the middle of her degree, she had to put everything on hold because she was getting married and wanted to have children of her own.
Sandison worked hard in the 1980s to get an associate’s degree, became a registered nurse, and then retired from that job as well. A friend of hers, though, told her that this wasn’t all she had ever wanted in life.
She said, “It was something I’ve always wanted.” Sandison remembered that her friend asked her, “What’s stopping you?” and she didn’t have an answer. So, Sandison went back to college after 60 years. In 2018, she went back to college so she could finally get her degree.
Four years later, at age 84, she walked across the stage at the College of Continuing and Professional Studies to get her bachelor’s degree in multidisciplinary studies.
“I’m very happy with myself.” “I mean, it was a goal, a dream come true,” Sandison said with a big smile.
Sandison says that none of it was an easy task. She said that tuition wasn’t as cheap as it used to be and that it was hard to learn new technologies, but her classmates were always there to help her. She said that she liked the friends she had with her classmates.
Sandison said of the younger students in her class, “It made me so happy, and when I looked at them, I thought, This world is going to be fine.”
She then told other people that they should follow their dreams no matter how old they are. “When people say, “I could never do that,” I tell them, “Yes, you could if you really wanted to.”
Sandison needed only 25 more credits to get her degree. Her family and friends threw her a party to celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment.