Edna Brown

Second Chance to Shine - The Before and After Lives of Mount Holyoke's Older Learners
Vista, Summer 1997, by Emily Harrison Weir

A Family First

Edna Brown '94 didn't consider college at age eighteen because no one told her why she should. "None of my family, friends, or neighbors knew about college and even the high school counselors didn't encourage us to apply," recalls the forty-eight-year-old Brown, who reasoned that a full-time income was preferable to paying for college. But after her son Vance was born Brown found her bank clerk's salary couldn't support them both. Public assistance paid the bills, and also provided child care and tuition assistance, so Brown could polish her secretarial skills at New York's Rockland Community College. This new start reawakened her desire to become a teacher, and Brown began taking liberal arts courses at Rockland. She learned about the FP program from her adviser, Ruth Cowan '51.

"Before MHC I didn't have goals," she says. "I just saw myself going to work and coming home, with no higher aspirations. MHC taught me not to settle for what I'm doing right now but to look for what more can be done and then to achieve it." The first in her family to attend college, Brown is now at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor earning a master's in social work and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology. "I've learned to be assertive, to open a door if it doesn't open on its own," she says.