By Misty Dierkhising
Campus Eye Staff
Juliana Boner is by no means a traditional student. By all accounts she is a whole new kind of superhero. Boner is a married, mother of 11, and grandmother to 23. She works full time at Anoka Ramsey Community College while taking online classes as well as a seated class this semester.
Boner is one of the many who are now taking up much of the population in academia, called non-traditional, or non-trads. At Anoka-Ramsey, non-traditional students make up roughly 38 percent of the population.
When pressed, Boner adimits that juggling school, work and family can be a challenge. “It’s always a balancing act. It’s a work in progress, all the time. You have to prioritize, keeping your deadlines in mind.”
Boner began classes in 1997, when she still had all 11 children home. Yet, with all that, she finished her master’s degree in Library and Information Science in 2003.
Recently, she began working at Anoka Ramsey in the data department, where she provides data to the departments of the college on enrollment and which high school sends the most kids over to ARCC.
One her benefits is free tuition, so she is taking some of the classes she had to pass up while she was pursuing her degrees. Boner has taken classes in art, American Sign Language, graphic design, business, computer networking, computer programming, music, and, now, creative writing.
Boner is currently taking her third class with English Professor Kate Kysar.
Kysar said she enjoys having Boner and other non-traditional students in her class because they bring another kind of diversity to the classroom.
“Non-traditional students are a joy in both my online and seated classes; most find value in learning and see the need to write well,” she said.
Kysar said the only negative for non-trads is the financial aspect. Oftentimes non-trads have reached the glass ceiling in their current careers and find they must go back to school to either up their degree or change it. Financially, it can be challenging for non-trads to return to school seeing they often have families and must deal with issues such as daycare and continuing to pay household expenses.
Boner prefers online classes versus seated classes because online allows her a more flexible schedule. Online classes do not have a lot of advantages, but they do allow flexibility. They are often harder, offer less direction and much less options in tutoring. By all accounts, students must be pretty self-sufficient in order to balance a few online classes.
If Boner has any free time, she enjoys reading, writing, baking, owning cats, gardening, blogging, web design, and dabbles in various arts and crafts, such as; scrapbooking, crocheting, sewing, and making jewelry.
“You can’t do everything. You have to look at the things that take up the biggest chunks of your time and schedule those in first. Then try to fit the other things in around them. Sometimes you have to sacrifice doing fun things when you have a lot of things to get done,” Boner said.