When Alethea Pruitt left school at Meridian Community College more than 30 years ago, she didn’t wander far from her devotion to people’s health and well-being, working at several jobs in the medical field.

“Some form of health care has always been a love,” she said.

But still, despite the important jobs she held, she felt a kind of gnawing to go back to school. Then about two years ago, she recalled, a few words from a nearby conversation planted the necessary seeds for her to do that. She was in a local nail salon, and she heard Adrian Cross conversing with a woman about the possibility of returning to school.

“I just overheard the conversation,” Pruitt, 54, said. “The way she was explaining school and trying to encourage the young lady to come back to school really touched me.”

Cross is a recruiter for Meridian Community College who focuses on non-traditional students.

Pruitt said she left the nail salon and then got into her car and began driving. But not for long.

“Something on the inside of me spoke and said ‘Go back. That’s the person you really need to talk to about going back to school,’” she said.

When she returned to the nail salon, Cross was still there — and the two talked and made an appointment to meet the following Monday, Pruitt explained. That started Pruitt on the path back to school, and she’s been attending MCC for about two years. Now, she’s pushed her studies a step further: she has been accepted into the Respiratory Care Practitioner Program — a program she began on Monday, as MCC classes started up for the fall.

The road back

Bob Sample, who teaches biology at MCC and who recently taught Pruitt, explained the way non-traditional students can find themselves in ripe positions to learn well — even if the trip back to school is accompanied by some anxiety.

“The easier part of teaching older learners is that they have more life experience,” Sample said. “So when you make an analogy … or a reference to something, they’ll (understand) because they’ve been around longer,” he said.

Cross noted, too, the way non-traditional students can make strong contributions in classes.

“Nontraditional students are workers,” she said. “They work, and they complain little. Most of them have already been here; this not their first rodeo.”

An obstacle, Cross said, can be financial aid, since older students might have used up the portion they’re allotted under the federal Pell Grant. Cross said she and several colleagues seek out funding sources from community organizations, and she noted other ways she helps returning adults find assistance for school.

“There’s a lot of assistance out there,” she said, though it sometimes requires the extra effort of writing an essay or performing some other task to unlock it.

Building on past experience

Pruitt has worked in medical records for several healthcare organizations, and she’s also earned certification in CPR and as a mastectomy fitter — a position that involves taking measurements for a prosthesis along with conversing and consulting with clients during a trying time. Those medical achievements add to a stock of experience she can bring to her new classes.

Pruitt said she loved her jobs and the people she worked with, but she detected there was something more waiting for her.

“I just had a sense I wanted more,” she said. “I just felt like that wasn’t all that God had for me … I had a sense or urge or something deep within that I was supposed to be more. I wanted to do more.”

As she began her studies at MCC as a returning student, Pruitt noticed some differences in the way she learned compared to the other students — or, for that matter, compared to her younger self decades earlier. Now, Pruitt said, she might want to hear information more than once, with a conscientious desire to ingrain it into her mind that hadn’t been present when she was younger.

“I’ll raise my hand and say, ‘Could you repeat that?’” she said, and sometimes she’d notice younger students in class wriggling with slight impatience. But Pruitt said she persevered.

“This is my life,” she said. “I am paying my money to go to school, and I want to do my best.”

Since she’s returned, Pruitt said, she’s made the dean’s list for two semesters, and she’s plunged into extracurricular activities that have put her in touch with other students.

Pruitt said, too, that the more time she spent in class the more the younger students grew to appreciate her — and to see her as someone who could help them, even mentor them.

“That’s what non-traditional students do,” she said. “You have had so many life experiences that you know a little bit more than the average freshman student. And that works. There are some younger students who look up to you. They’re younger, and you’re a little bit older and more balanced.”

Pruitt said she’s developed bonds with younger students whom she’s helped and who also help her — particularly with technology. Creating an Excel spreadsheet, she said, posed a challenge that a younger student recently helped her to tackle.

As for her choice of study, Pruitt talked about respiratory therapy — and, more generally, health care — as something fundamental to her most deeply held values and interests. She recalled her grandmother’s dying of ovarian cancer, and she noted taking care of her grandparents as they aged.

“You just have that compassion, or love, to help other people,” she said.

Pruitt said she also revels in learning about how the body works.

“I love the anatomy of the body,” she said. “We don’t realize what we really, truly have inside to make our body function every day.”

And respiration, as she described it, comprises a particularly fundamental part of that process.

“It’s all about breathing,” Pruitt said. “Without breathing, you don’t have life.”