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Elbert Chapman
Age: 76
Major: Business administration
MASTERING COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY— including online courses—has been the biggest challenge for 76-year-old business major Elbert Chapman. “When I first came here, we had slide rules made out of wood,” he says. “That’s all obsolete now.” If the spring course schedule works in his favor, Chapman could graduate in May, and that’s a thrilling prospect for his wife, Joyce, and the entire Chapman family. “One of our granddaughters will be graduating from high school in May and a grandson from college,” she says. “It really will be a big celebration.”
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Larry Korth
Age: 69
Major: History
A RAILROAD CABOOSE located on the grounds of the S.C. Botanical Gardens contains a small museum dedicated to the Clemson College Class of 1939—which also happens to be the subject of Larry Korth’s master’s thesis. Pursuing a graduate degree in history late in life has been an adventure for the 69-year-old retired insurance executive, but he always felt welcomed by his younger classmates. “They have been extremely accepting,” he says. “The downside is they hold the door for me and call me ‘sir,’ but when I’m in class, I’m just another student. The same can be said for my professors. They’ve all been terrific.”
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Susan Chandler
Age: 62
Major: Geology
“IT'S BEEN WONDERFUL TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL,” says Susan Chandler, who spent many hours examining samples in the mineralogy lab while earning her bachelor’s degree in geology. “I love learning.” In the course of her studies, Chandler often encouraged younger students to treat her as an equal, but maternal instincts occasionally kicked in. “There were a couple of general-education science courses—not geology—that were sort of like babysitting when you’ve got a 17-year-old who just won’t stop playing with the Bunsen burner. But as a parent and being my age, I can look at them and say, ‘These are neat kids, and they’ve got good things to give.’”
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Meet our "seasoned" students
They each talk about going back to the classroom.
Elbert Chapman
Age: 76
Major: Business administration
MASTERING COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY— including online courses—has been the biggest challenge for 76-year-old business major Elbert Chapman. “When I first came here, we had slide rules made out of wood,” he says. “That’s all obsolete now.”
If the spring course schedule works in his favor, Chapman could graduate in May, and that’s a thrilling prospect for his wife, Joyce, and the entire Chapman family. “One of our granddaughters will be graduating from high school in May and a grandson from college,” she says. “It really will be a big celebration.”
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Elbert Chapman started attending Clemson University in 1954.
He will graduate in 2013.
Chapman has not wasted the nearly 60 years from start to finish. In fact, those decades have been chock-full—a successful career, a lasting marriage, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren—all the makings of a full life.
Why, then, would the 76-year-old Laurens native choose to return to college well past retirement age?
“I am one who likes to finish everything that I start,” he says. In 1954, Clemson University was an all-male military college where the cadets wore uniforms, marched at least twice a week and stood in formation before every meal. Chapman says he didn’t mind being a cadet but discovered he “did not fit into college life.”
“Everybody wanted to be an engineer in 1954, so we all applied to the school of engineering,” he recalls. “After two years of lackluster performance, I changed majors to industrial management.”
He left Clemson a year later, took a job managing industrial construction projects, married his wife, Joyce, and put his college days behind him. Or so he thought.
“At least twice in 40 years I found myself out of a job and outside with no foreseeable way to get back in quickly because of the lack of a degree,” says Chapman.
He enrolled at Clemson a second time in the ’60s but left after his fourth child was born. He had mouths to feed. This time around, his children (and grandchildren) are all grown, and Chapman is comfortably retired. Now, he can get down to business—or, rather, business management, his chosen major.
“The school agreed to accept part of my earlier courses toward my degree. Therefore, I may graduate before I am a hundred,” he jokes.
Despite the difference in age, Chapman says he enjoys learning alongside his younger classmates.
“I stick out like a sore thumb, as you can imagine,” he says with a laugh. “But everybody is very nice.”
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Larry Korth
Age: 69
Major: History
A RAILROAD CABOOSE located on the grounds of the S.C. Botanical Gardens contains a small museum dedicated to the Clemson College Class of 1939—which also happens to be the subject of Larry Korth’s master’s thesis.
Pursuing a graduate degree in history late in life has been an adventure for the 69-year-old retired insurance executive, but he always felt welcomed by his younger classmates. “They have been extremely accepting,” he says. “The downside is they hold the door for me and call me ‘sir,’ but when I’m in class, I’m just another student. The same can be said for my professors. They’ve all been terrific.”
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LARRY KORTH MAY HAIL FROM CHICAGO, but it is the South’s history he finds captivating.
His fascination started with the Civil War. He devoured books on the subject as he went about his life raising a family and enjoying a 40-year career in the insurance industry. Shortly after he retired to Anderson, Clemson University’s history courses caught his eye.
“To be in college at my age sounded interesting,” Korth says, so he signed up for one class, curious if he could keep up with the younger students. After that, he was hooked.
“The more I learned about what led up to the Civil War—the thought processes, the war itself, post-Civil War and Reconstruction and the New South—the more I wanted to learn.”
In 2009, at the age of 66, Korth began graduate school at Clemson seeking a master’s degree in history. After four decades of work and two years in retirement, he was suddenly faced with a staggering amount of reading. Every day. But the challenges didn’t discourage Korth, who says he “doesn’t suffer failure well.” This semester, he intends to complete his 100-plus-page thesis on the Clemson University Class of 1939, a singularly outstanding group of alumni.
“This is a group which has done an enormous amount of good for the university and is terribly loyal to the university,” he says. “They were teenagers in the Depression, and then they came to Clemson, which at the time was an all-military school. From there, they went directly to World War II. They had all these experiences that bound them together.”
And while he will be happy to finish his thesis and have a master’s degree under his belt, Korth feels he has gained more from the experience than a knack for writing papers.
“I think I’m a better learner, and I think I am a more interested learner than I was,” he says. “The experience itself is absolutely worthwhile.”
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Susan Chandler
Age: 62
Major: Geology
“IT'S BEEN WONDERFUL TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL,” says Susan Chandler, who spent many hours examining samples in the mineralogy lab while earning her bachelor’s degree in geology. “I love learning.”
In the course of her studies, Chandler often encouraged younger students to treat her as an equal, but maternal instincts occasionally kicked in. “There were a couple of general-education science courses—not geology—that were sort of like babysitting when you’ve got a 17-year-old who just won’t stop playing with the Bunsen burner. But as a parent and being my age, I can look at them and say, ‘These are neat kids, and they’ve got good things to give.’”
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SUSAN CHANDLER HAS ALWAYS BEEN A FAN OF ROCK. Not The Rolling Stones as much as the stones that make up Planet Earth.
“The geology bug bit me when I was about 10,” Chandler says. “[A college] student … handed me a geode, a rock that’s hollow in the middle with a crystal lining. I was fascinated.”
Thus began a love affair that has withstood the test of time. And while Chandler’s “innate passion for things of the earth” may have been placed on the back burner for the majority of her adult life, it was a flame waiting patiently to be rekindled.
Chandler first graduated from Clemson University in 1971 with a degree in psychology and went to work in the human services field. Several jobs, a marriage and four children later, she found herself in New Jersey. And though she raised her family there, “New Jersey was not my cup of tea.”
Family life also left her little time to pursue her first love, but she would absorb as much knowledge as she could, when she could. If geological specials aired on television, she couldn’t get enough. Tectonic theory was coming into its own in the 1980s, and Chandler lapped it up.
By 2002, Chandler was a divorced, empty nester and finally ready to return to her native Clemson. Her father, Dr. Roy H. Bailey, had taught chemistry at Clemson, and she knew it was where she was meant to be.
“My blood runneth orange,” she says, laughing. “Being my father’s daughter, I love learning. I’m curious, and I have an analytical mind. I started taking geology classes, and decided I wanted to get the degree.”
At the age of 55, Chandler became a student at Clemson University alongside students more than 30 years her junior. Mineralogy, sedimentology, stratigraphy, chemistry and calculus—she relished the return to academia and the chance to stretch her mind.
“I would be up until three in the morning crying and pulling my hair out trying to finish the homework assignment for the next day,” she says, but the payoff was always worth the effort. “When I got it done, it was like, ‘Yes! I did it!’ Learning something is satisfying no matter what age you are.”
Chandler finished her bachelor’s degree in geology in 2010, but she still takes classes that interest her, and she has plans to pursue a master’s degree.
“The world is a fascinating, awesome place,” she says. “To live is to keep on learning.”
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Get More
If you’re a “seasoned citizen,” here’s a powerful incentive to go back to school: free tuition. State law provides for a tuition exemption for citizens age 60 and older at public colleges, universities and tech schools, subject to some conditions. Fees, books and other expenses are not covered. For more information, contact the admissions office of the school you’d like to attend. For links to various schools across the state, visit sciway.net/edu/colleges/sc-senior-citizen-education.html.