Students balance home and work

By Emily Bjorklund

Class, food, sleep, homework, party: the usual routine for the usual Santa Clara student. Class, food, a few hours of sleep, homework, take daughter to dance lessons: the usual routine for Noelani Sallings.

Sallings represents a small minority on campus: the rare hybrid of mother and student presented in the form of one very busy 21st century woman. The 27-year-old psychology major transferred to Santa Clara from a junior college after pursuing a career that crashed in the dot-com bomb. Her 8-year-old daughter Jennalynn has her own repertoire of activity, which constitutes Sallings' study time.

"Jennalynn has acting class on Wednesday, so during that time I catch up on my reading," she said.

Despite her unique circumstances and hectic schedule, Sallings expects no special treatment from professors, although she does emphasize that "family always comes first."

She has the support of her husband who will watch Jennalynn if she is sick or misses school, but she somehow manages to juggle both roles, making what the rest of us do look like mere child's play. When asked what her plans for Mother's Day were, she casually responded, "Oh, I think I have a midterm the next day, so we might just go skateboarding."

Unlike Sallings, English major Heidi Williams waited for her children to reach college before joining them to earn a degree she had started 25 years earlier.

Williams, who also works in the engineering department, has two daughters, ages 18 and 22. She got married after her freshman year at San Jose State and started working right away to support her family, putting her college goal on the back burner while she raised her daughters.

However, after obtaining her job at Santa Clara and the reassurance that her daughters were grown up themselves, she overcame her fear of taking the Core-required math class and pursued her love for literature.

Williams says "coming to school after experiencing life means so much more."

She recognizes the different perspectives she brings to the classroom. In her literature class, Williams studied a story about divorce in which "all of the younger students viewed the divorce of the characters through the eyes of the children, while I was the only one who saw it from the wife's perspective."

Having college-aged children, she finds herself trading research tips and even studying the same material as her daughters. As a mother and fellow student, Williams offered a pearl of wisdom to the less enlightened. "Whenever you can get your education is good, you can take time off, maybe get your graduate degree later, it might mean all that much more," she said. Her oldest daughter will be graduating from Gonzaga University this Sunday, Mother's Day, which she says "is the best Mother's Day gift a mom could ask for."