Alumni Spotlight

This past year, as I watched the puppet ensemble sing “I Want to Go Back to School� in the Broadway musical Avenue Q, I really identified. In 1974, after years of wondering why I left the University of Minnesota and wishing I could go back, I finally did.

This is not to say that the U wasn’t exciting back in 1956, when I was solving the world’s problems with friends at the Bridge Café or sitting on the steps of Northrop in hopes I would turn as tan as those students returning from spring break in Florida. But I was so busy enjoying my social freedom that I forgot to pay attention to classes. When my freshman year was up, I left school to join the work world. I enjoyed it, but a year later, after I was married and working on campus, I realized what I had given up. It was more than a longing to be like the carefree students I saw: it was the books they lugged around that I missed, the chance to study and learn, then to choose new subjects ten weeks later and start all over again.

Eighteen years, four children, and several careers later, I returned to school. At thirty-five, I thought I was the oldest person ever to pick up a class schedule. But once I started, I made up for lost time. I quickly earned my bachelor’s in political science and then my master’s in American studies. I did all the coursework for a doctorate, later returning to get my master’s in social work. I took nothing for granted, and I loved the clear-cut order of it all: the newness of each term, followed by midterm papers and pressure-filled final exams.

Life does not always provide second chances, but for me, and no doubt for other students who have returned to the U, school was truly better the second time around.

Ms. Kaplan is a former social worker and restaurateur. She and her husband, Sam Kaplan, endowed the U of M’s Graduate Research Fellowship in Social Justice. She holds a B.A. in Political Science (’76), an M.A. in American Studies (’79), and an M.S. in Social Work (’90) from the U of M.