I started attending Westminster College classes in the Master of Professional Communication program in the fall of 2003. Eager to attend a small college after the huge classes of my undergraduate school, my Westminster classes ranged from four to fifteen students.
I first went to the Admissions Office on a brittle fall day, wearing one of my mother’s tweed jackets. My mother had graduated from College of Wooster in Ohio, a lovely small college where I’d always secretly wanted to go myself. I remember how it felt so right to be entering Westminster College with leaves swirling around me on that blustery August day. The Admissions person was so friendly, the MPC program so welcoming, and I felt so privileged to have the opportunity to pick up with formal education at age 55.
Over five years, I took 35 credits, often one class a semester. My classes included Technical Writing, Communication Ethics and the Democratic Process, Writing for Peer-Reviewed Publications, Writing for Popular Publications, Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Effective Presentations, Travel Writing, Professional Editing, Design Principles and Desktop Publishing, Grant Research and Writing, Freelance Writing, “The Art of Indexing” (a self-designed, Directed Studies class), and Visual Communication. I completed my degree with the field project “The MPC Field Project Index,” in which I catalogued the 220 MPC field projects completed from 1992 to 2007. I walked as an MPC graduate at the Delta Center in May 2008.