I’ve been in and out of this door since the 1990s but hadn’t noticed this owl reading a book carved over the door until my husby pointed it out this Fall.

My first semester of graduate school has just ended. It was my first full-time gig outside our house since my kids were born. With school, my kids, and continued work on my career as a novelist, my commitments amounted to more than full-time. This would probably be the case for anyone who’s been alive as long as I have–who’s had this many years to complicate a life. Still, if you’re an old person (by which I mean, over 28) thinking about going back to school, I say take the time and do it. You can do it, especially if you heed these handy tips:

• On campus, never use the bathrooms on the main floors. They are “oversubscribed.” The clean, peaceful third floor bathrooms are worth the hike and will provide all the privacy we need for using the facilities, or maybe even a quick cry. Which reminds me…
• Get a good backpack and carry some Kleenex in it. You will be asked for it. In fact…
• If a newly-minted grownup, a student, is lost on campus, desperately wishing their mom was around, and happens to see you walking along like a personal gift from a benevolent cosmos, they will prefer you over a peer as someone to stop to ask for directions and to help them generally feel less alone and sad. This is not a time to get snarky about “emotional labour.” It’s a time to be kind and patient and cultivate a rough knowledge of the whereabouts of those obscure computing science labs. But remember…
• As far as educational achievement goes, the young students are our peers. It is completely inappropriate to try to assert dominance over them. If they don’t revert to treating us like they would their mom’s friends, great. Go with it. By and large, they are lovely humans and it is an honor to have any significance in their lives. However…
• Go ahead and have high expectations of those young classmates. For a student, doing 80% of a perfect job will still earn them a decent final score on their schoolwork. For people who’ve been in the workforce, we know doing 80% of a perfect job could getcha fired. It’ll do the young folks good for you to insist on bringing that esoteric bibliography format up to code before you pass in the group project. And in the same vein…
• As far as educational achievement goes, our professors, no matter what their ages, are not our peers. We must present ourselves to them every bit as humbly, as open-mindedly as the young students do. No one likes an old student who comes to class to act like she and the prof are out for coffee with a bunch of annoying kids tagging along—not the other students and not the professors either. As we show respect for our professors and the work they did obtaining academic expertise while we were doing other things, they will in turn show respect for us and those “other things” we were doing to contribute the world outside their expertise. Showing off and shutting people down are not how this respect is earned. And anyways…
• Showing off would only set us up to look even stupider than necessary when the moments come for us to make dumb mistakes as school. Everyone messes up sometimes, especially people re-adapting to an educational system which had just about passed them by. The quicker and more good-humoredly we admit, own, and laugh off our mistakes, the more likely we are for other people to let them go too and maybe even to look out for us next time. Frankly, there is less social and academic peril in letting people think you’re a tiny bit stupider than you are than in letting them think you’re much, much smarter than you are.
• Go ahead and be cool. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of cool: selfish cool and selfless cool. When I was young, I admired the heck out of selfless cool people (I’m looking at you, Angie Dahl) and wished I knew how they did it. I think both kinds of cool include elements of not being overly anxious about taking social risks—even little risks like talking to strangers or to a room full of people—and taking those risks with ease and confidence. In cases of selfish coolness, this confidence is maintained by pre-emptively lashing out with cruel humor, abuse, or the shunning of those who would call into question the coolness. In selfless coolness, this confidence is maintained with warmth, sincere praise, and believing people are good and wish us the best until they actually do. The ease with which those kinds of feelings come is the best thing about being an old broad at school. I spend all day in a place where everybody is brilliant, beautiful, and loveable. School has always been this way, and now I am finally old enough to know.