🎉 Chelsea’s Graduation Celebration 🎉

Why go back to school… in Chelsea’s words…

When people ask me about my hopes and dreams, I have a hard time answering the question. My default is always thinking about what everyone else wants and how I can best support others in their hopes and dreams.

However, there’s one thing that I wanted to do just for me. When I was in high school, I honestly just hated high school, so I decided to make my own schedule and try to save some money at the same time, so I dual-enrolled at the local community college in town. A month before I got my high school diploma, I walked across a baseball field in south Florida (wearing long pants under my cap and gown in May…surprised I didn’t have a heat stroke) to get my associate’s degree.

Fast forward to what would’ve been “freshman year” in college, I moved away from home to continue working on a degree path that I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to follow, but I was 18 and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life so I picked something familiar and something most people wanted me to do.

Ultimately, I left school and came back home. Tried to go back online and it was too expensive so I stopped. Ended up working through a program online with Berklee College of Music to get a certification but it was always in the back of my head that I never finished. The jobs that I had over the years never required me to finish and to this day, there was no “need” to finish.

So now we’re in 2020 and the world shut down. It was a time when we had too much time to rethink our lives and I thought “hey, why not?” Why not? I can tell you why not. I had a 4 year old and a 2 year old with a baby on the way. I owned my own business that was severely impacted by the world shutting down and we were trying to figure out how to make it. Did that stop me? Hahahaha nope. I started online at the University of Florida in Fall 2020 and while I do not recommend giving birth in the middle the semester, I made it through my first two classes.

Now, if all you take away from this is that I live in Tallahassee but I went to UF, you can see yourself out. I actually tried to go to FSU, but I went for a degree that I knew I could actually use and UF had an online option that FSU didn’t. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter where I went. I could’ve gone somewhere no one had ever heard about and it wouldn’t have mattered.

I went slow. Told myself I would take a maximum of two classes at a time. Some semesters I took one. Some I took none. I questioned why I was doing this at least once (usually more) every semester. I cried…a lot. I was always a terrible test taker and newsflash: I still am. There were times I wanted to stop. Times I tried to drop out (shout out to my husband for calling my bluff every time). But I didn’t stop.

So here we are in 2025. Unless something terrible happens, I will be graduating with my Bachelors degree in Public Relations in December from the University of Florida and I worked my butt off to graduate Summa Cum Laude. So I’ll be the 35 year old walking across the stage at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center to prove that I could do it. For my kids to see their mom set out to do something hard and finish it. For a better relationships with my clients and friends in the industry. Most importantly, I did it for me.