Nina Hollon:

So I got to spend a lot of time on campus at the University of Maine as a child, because my dad was an English professor.

For my whole life he was a professor up there and he retired about 10 years ago.

This is actually a picture of him.

So we spent a lot of time there growing up, running around his office in the English department and poking around classrooms and the library and just really all over campus actually, kind of a great place to grow up.

Hi, my name is Nina Hollon and I’m in the University Studies Program and I’m from Orono, Maine.

So I grew up in Maine but I went to California for college and after staying there for a while, working in New York and living in New York,

I got the chance to move back here about 10 years ago and I’ve been here ever since.

So I did start college when I was 19 and I was sort of a traditional student at that point and took regular classes full time and then I had to start working.

Once I started working I shifted over to evening classes and then I was more part time so that the college experience kind of spread out after my first year and I kept working and then my job kept getting more demanding and so I just got to a point where I couldn’t take classes anymore and when you move internally at a company from job to job, they don’t ask you for a resume, they don’t ask you what degree you have.

You’re known by your reputation.

I was coming up on 30 years at a job that I had been at.

I left that company, I started researching, running a consulting business which is what I’m doing now and while I had that sort of down time, it occurred to me that this was the perfect opportunity to go back and finish school and that was something that really nobody knew.

Nobody really knew that I hadn’t finished college and I was embarrassed about it.

I reached out to the University of Maine and I found the University Studies program and the people were fantastic and they helped me understand how I could really pretty easily become part of UMaine, become part of that program and showed me that within about two years

I could have my degree and so that’s what I’m doing now.

What I like about being able to study anywhere is probably this. I can literally be outside on the deck, I can be in my house, I can be in another country doing my schoolwork and it just works really well for the life that I have.

I recently just had some family visiting from Luxembourg and I took them on campus and we got to walk all around and we were walking into the gym, the New Balance Center and they said, “Are you allowed in here?”

And I said, “Yeah, it’s open all the time.” And then I sort of paused and I thought, “I’m a student

here. We can go in here.”

And I pulled out my student ID and showed them and we sort of laughed.