I went back to school at forty-seven and I graduated in May, and I want to write the unglamorous version.

I dropped out of college in 1997 with three semesters left. There were reasons and most of them were money and one of them was a bad year that I'm not going to detail.

For twenty-six years I told people I "did some college." I built a whole career anyway — I ran a department, I made decent money, I trained people who had degrees. And every single time it came up I felt a specific small thing that I never named out loud.

I enrolled in 2021. Online, part-time, two classes a semester.

Here is what nobody tells you. It was not inspiring. It was four years of being tired. I did statistics homework at a kitchen table at eleven at night while my kids were asleep, and I failed a class in 2022 and had to retake it, and there were two separate semesters where I nearly quit and the only reason I didn't was that I'd already paid.

My wife carried more than her share for four years and I don't think I've properly thanked her.

The graduation itself was anticlimactic. It was online. I got a PDF.

But in June I was in a meeting and someone asked a question about regression and I answered it, and the thing I felt wasn't pride exactly. It was the absence of something. That small thing I'd been carrying since 1997 just wasn't in the room.

If you're forty-something and the math feels impossible: it took four years and it was boring and nothing dramatic happened. That's the whole story. It still worked.