"Upon graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1955, I expected to..."

 
Hi! I'm Deb Nash, class of 1955. When I graduated from Mt. Holyoke College I expected…. If I wanted to be something other than a wife and mother, then I would be able to do that. I didn't have any idea what that would be. I was a political science major, English minor, and as it happened I married my boyfriend who became a physician. And when he finished his training (we were married in l955), he went to work in l969 and I, after having three children, decided I wasn't going to live the life of just the volunteer and play tennis and bridge. I wanted to do something. So I researched and networked and decided I wanted to work in secondary education so I went to graduate school. I went to graduate school at Case Western in Cleveland, Ohio and got my masters in education with a specialty in counseling. I did my field work at a local girls' school and when they had an opening in l973, the headmaster came to me and we chatted one afternoon and he called me the next day and said would you like a job? And I said, a job…are you kidding? I have three children, I'm in graduate school and I am not finished. But it was literally the perfect job for me and who I was and I had to take the opportunity when it came. So I went to work in the fall of l973, full time, with three small children and still in graduate school. I was a director of admissions of a school, girls' school K-12 and the college counselor. All of my Mount Holyoke education and curriculum came into play as I settled into a school culture and in an academic place. I had good preparation for that. I worked at the girls school for almost ten years and then went to a boys school where I worked for sixteen years, training teachers, counseling students, counseling faculty and basically had an incredibly wonderful life. I retired four years ago and I believe that the education has come into play equally in the time of retirement because you have that resource behind you and that wonderful basket of possibilities of things that will make your life rich and full and interesting, not the least of which is the connection to the people in the class. We have all come back and touched base and found that many of us have had very interesting lives and that a we have this common bond of our academic experience. And thought we've been in very different worlds for the last, it's hard, it's fifty years' we find that we have a lot in common and a lot of interests that we share. And so part of this time of life is being with people whom we studied with and were friends back a long time ago. You get very busy in your own little world of child rearing and work. You lose some of those connections in an intimate way and at this stage it's , it's back again. So form the experience at Mt. Holyoke plus literally the foundation from my family who valued education. Going to one of the Seven Sisters was a major credential at that time in life. If you went to one of those colleges, doors would open and you would so what you wanted to do and that's exactly what happened. So, that's just been a wonderful experience and it's great to have a chance to share that with people from Mt. Holyoke today. Thank you very much.