Adults returning to college for a graduate degree: What to know

After graduating from college in 2006, Kim Posillico planned to continue her studies — but life got in the way.

While pursuing her master’s degree part time, Posillico, 49, of Oakdale, said she was also juggling being a mother and working as a middle school English teacher.

“It was a lot,” she recalled.

Posillico wound up leaving graduate school. But after suffering two strokes in February 2021, she said she was inspired to try again. In May, she finally got her master’s degree from Stony Brook University.

“It’s a lot harder to do things when you’re older. I don’t have the same experiences as most of the other people in our classes,” she said. But, she noted, “I also had other opportunities to include things I have learned in my 49 years that they did not know. It’s very good because we can bounce off one another.”

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 31% of full-time and 62% of part-time graduate students were over 30 as of fall 2021.

“There are plenty of people who might have started school or are working in the field and they realized, ‘Maybe this isn’t what I want to do with my life full time,’ ” said Frederick Koromi, director of graduate admissions at Stony Brook University.

Ephraim Hathaway had just such an epiphany in 2020.

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Hathaway, 34, of Manhattan, said he worked for eight years at Shell as an on-site representative and drilling engineer. As he traveled across the country for his job, he found that he liked talking to people about their well-being. When work briefly shut down during the pandemic, Hathaway said he began to reevaluate his career choice.

“I just had the time to reflect on . . . what was most important to me, and that was those conversations I’ve had with people about what they want to do to be healthy,” he said.

After attending postbaccalaureate programs to fulfill his prerequisites and working with patients, Hathaway said he was accepted into Hofstra University’s medical school and started studying to become a doctor in the summer of 2023.

Of the gap between undergraduate and medical school, he said, “I needed that time . . . to be more sure of who I was.”