Unlearning the timeline: reflections of a nontraditional student

Editor’s note: This the first of two MinnPost Community Voices commentaries on the challenges facing nontraditional students. Coming Thursday: How Minnesota can close the gaps by building education systems that fit real lives.

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There is an unspoken script that so many of us inherit long before we ever choose the life we want. A timeline. A sequence. A belief that life must unfold in a linear progression: graduate at 22, career by 24, stability by 27, mastery by 30.

It’s everywhere, embedded in school systems, reinforced in family expectations, echoed across social media and whispered through comparison. The world measures progress by speed. It celebrates the prodigy, the sprinters, but overlooks the endurance of those running entire marathons before they even enter the classroom. And for nontraditional students, this script can feel like a weight.

Some of us have restarted. Some of us returned. Some of us have rebuilt. Some of us arrive at our purpose through detours, and some of us, like me, come back to the classroom after life has already demanded work, sacrifice, motherhood, resilience, survival, transformation and courage. 

Related: Why traditional college majors may be holding nontraditional students back in a rapidly changing job market

Yet higher education still largely centers its identity around the 18- to 22-year-old living on campus with no dependents. The real students in our classrooms include:

Student parents navigating lectures, childcare, work schedules and sleep deprivation with astonishing resilience.

First-generation students carrying the weight of family expectation and generational hope as well as the courage of first steps into uncharted territory.

Students working full-time or multiple jobs, not because they want to, but because they have to.

Returning adult learners who left school years, or decades, ago and are choosing courage over comfort by coming back.

Students supporting their families financially, often serving as the backbone of entire households while pursuing a degree.

Immigrant students learning new systems, new languages and new norms while redefining what opportunity looks like.

Nontraditional students operate on a different timeline

As a nontraditional student, I’ve had to unlearn the idea that education has an expiration date, the belief that your worth is tied to your age and the assumption that the traditional route is the superior one. I’ve had to accept that the timeline I was taught to measure myself against was never designed with students like me in mind.

There is a certain kind of strength that grows in students who had to pause, pivot or start again. Nontraditional students bring something to academia that cannot be taught — lived experience. Not theories, realities. Leadership, conflict-resolution, discipline, self-directed learning, emotional intelligence, adaptability, resourcefulness. These are not bullet points on a résumé; they’re built from navigating life.

As a nontraditional student, my journey has taught me this:

I am not here to catch up.

I am here to ascend, deliberately, intentionally, and on my own terms.

There is no timeline for becoming.

There is only the moment you choose to begin.

And for anyone who feels “behind,” I offer this truth:

You are not behind.

You are bilingual in experience.

You are arriving with context, wisdom and clarity.

Coming back is not a setback.

It is a declaration of hope, and hope at any age is powerful.

And your journey with all its delays, deviations, detours, responsibilities and restarts is not something to hide.

It is your advantage.

Unlearn the timeline.

Reclaim your pace.

Refine your benchmarks.

Honor your becoming.

Higher education is evolving, slowly but undeniably, toward the reality of who students actually are — complex, resilient and beautifully nonlinear.

And so must we.

Because the timeline was never the point.

Becoming was.

Javelia Morrison-Galimore is a student at St. Cloud State University, where she is vice chair of Students United and president of the Caribbean Student Association.

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