A special moment

A cord wrapped tight with strands of red, blue and white. For students, cords are a physical way to showcase achievements during Commencement Ceremonies. It’s no different for Rhonda Woolsey, USI Special Events Supervisor. However, when Joel Matherly, Director of USI’s Veteran, Military and Family Resource Center, gave Woolsey a set of tri-color cords to wear during her Commencement walk this Spring (normally provided to students who served in the military or who are veterans), she says they took on another important meaning.

“My dad served, though he didn’t ever want to be called a veteran because he didn’t serve during wartime. But it’s like Joel said, he was in the Corp during the Cold War era, and it was just as stressful,” she explained.

As a first-generation graduate who was encouraged by her parents, the cords make her graduation even more special.

On Saturday, May 4, Woolsey will join other USI graduates as she accepts two degrees she has earned—a Bachelor of Professional Studies degree in applied studies and a Bachelor of Science degree in communication studies. When she started the pursuit of an undergraduate degree in the summer of 2017, a professional studies track with an emphasis in organizational leadership was right in line with how her current career tracked.

After graduating high school in 1987, Woolsey says she was able to take good-paying, fulfilling jobs that did not require her to have a college degree. She spent the 1990s and early 2000s in various positions at Whirlpool Corporation in Evansville and General Electric Aircraft Engines in Madisonville, Kentucky. But as time went on, things began to change, she says.

“Being a Production Associate, or having titles similar to that, wasn’t enough for me. I had too many good ideas, too many things I wanted to help shape,” Woolsey explains.

After getting a taste of exploring ideas and improving projects at General Electric, she realized she loved to make things easier and work to make things “leaner.” But as time marched on from the 1990s into the 2000s, upward movement in her career became difficult without a degree.

Once her daughter began college courses, Woolsey realized it was the right time to start on her own degree. “I started taking classes out of frustration. Even if I could do the job or I had been doing the job, I couldn’t get the title without the degree,” she says. “And once I started those classes, I realized I had forgotten how much I loved school. It was what I was missing.”

When she first enrolled at USI, pursuing a Bachelor of Professional Studies in Organizational Leadership was the perfect fit with her career background and also with being a non-traditional student. However, Woolsey realized that her course work put her close to also being able to finish a second degree—that was when she made the decision to double-major in communication studies. “After my first class in communication, I was hooked. I love it, and I’m good at it,” she adds.

On the precipice of graduating, Woolsey thinks back to her parents and the interesting journey of her education. She describes her parents as reclusive—her mother was a stay-at-home mom, and her father worked constantly—but they always wanted her to attend college. Her father passed away in 1991, which makes the cords she will wear in his honor so meaningful. “Now my daddy gets to walk with me,” she says with a smile.

Graduating gives Woolsey validation and firm proof that she can do anything she sets out to do. “I was told I couldn’t do something so often that I decided to not take it to heart anymore,” she says.

That belief is found in her two favorite quotes, she says. The first, by Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “Your ignorance is their power.” The second is from Max Weber, who said, “We live in the iron cage of others’ expectations.”

For her, graduating not only gives her validation but also allows her to break out from the expectations of others.

“I’m a different person today than I was when I started, and I have learned patience and understanding of people,” she explains. “I’m not really smarter, because I knew all this stuff before. I just had never thought about it so deeply before.”

And though she will walk on Saturday, officially becoming a college graduate, Woolsey has no intention of stopping her education journey now. She is already mulling over which master’s degree she would like to pursue—either business administration or communication studies. “Without my family’s patience and my department’s flexibility, these degrees would not have been possible. And I don’t intend to stop,” she says with certainty. “I intend to take a break, but I don’t intend to stop.”