Senior season

Sydney Bishop

Olyn Gee, 75, had always wanted to go to the University of Georgia. However, financial circumstances before HOPE or Zell Miller scholarships were introduced led him to community college, instead. Now, somewhere in between 12 years of attending UGA and two degrees, Gee is still taking in all the classroom education UGA has to offer.

And the best part? Every class Gee has ever taken at the university has been free.

Back to school

The University System of Georgia—which includes UGA, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia College and State University and Georgia State University, among many others—allows Georgia residents 62 years old and older to attend college at little or no cost. The senior citizen tuition waiver program has allowed many older Georgians to enroll as students at UGA.

The only caveats are senior citizen students cannot register for classes until all other students have, and dental, veterinary, medical and law school are not covered. Students also must produce a birth certificate proving their age and meet all other university admission requirements.

According to the Georgia Educational Researcher, an academic journal, as of the 2019 fiscal year, 71.9% of the Georgia 62-and-up program were seeking degrees, 936 out of 1,301 students.

This leaves a good chunk of non-degree seeking students in the program, like James Burns, 63, a former art teacher at Savannah College of Art and Design who has no plans to graduate anytime soon.

Burns found out about the program from Gee after he had started taking classes. Burns currently takes a mixture of art and French classes, and as a former art teacher with 30 years of experience in the medium, he wants to contribute more to the classroom.

“I keep wanting to seek out teachers and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this experience,’” Burns said. “I’d love to come in and do a one-day thing about the best way to use Photoshop or the best way to use [Adobe] Illustrator.”

Burns doesn’t participate in the program for the degree but rather the structure and routine it gives him in retirement.

“At this point, I’m so retired … what would I do with it?” Burns said. “I like being in a class where the project is due next week and you have to think about it and produce something.”

Gee, on the other hand, has earned journalism and political science degrees through the program. He started taking classes in January 2011 and even moved him and his wife from Canton, Georgia—where he was working as a wedding photographer—to Athens.

While Gee has taken full advantage of the program, he believes it’s something that can seem out of reach for many.

“It’s intimidating when [you’re with] all the students who were at the top of their high school class … [But] I think it’s an excellent way for an older person to stay involved. Just to keep themselves young, surrounded by young people all the time. You start thinking more like a young person and less like a retired person,” Gee said.

While working towards his journalism degree at UGA, Gee even started writing for The Red & Black during the summer of 2019 to keep learning about writing at the suggestion of Burns’ wife, Rebecca, Gee’s first journalism professor at UGA and The Red & Black’s former publisher.

Why now?

For Annette Paskiewicz, 62, an Athens resident since 2007, her back to school journey hasn’t started just yet. Regardless, she’s been dreaming of an opportunity like this for a long time.

Since 1991, Paskiewicz has had success making glass jewelry. However, her ultimate goal is to go back to school for fine arts and to find galleries to represent her. She admits her jewelry and time as a craft artist had its heyday in the ‘90s.

“[Back then], everybody had a lot more money to blow,” Paskiewicz said.

Back at school, Paskiewicz can focus on other mediums like painting and sculpting. But getting into the world of fine art is far and away from the only reason Paskiewicz has her sights set on the UGA 62-and-up program.

“Part of me feels like this is an opportunity to take better care of myself as I age. I will be introducing myself to community, people [and] connections,” Paskiewicz said. “They say in studies, longevity of life is [tied to] your connection to others. That’s what makes you live the longest.”

Paskiewicz calls the program a “little pot of gold over on the other side of town,” a place where she can receive and absorb information more readily than she did when she first went to college at University of Wisconsin-Madison for her art degree.

“I did terrible in art history and I should’ve done great,” Paskiewicz said. “It’s my field and I did terribly because I hated it. I didn’t want to study what they did in Egypt or whatever and now I would be. I would love to know. You have a different attitude when you’re older.”

Older and wiser

The UGA student body has no shortage of new faces, but every semester, students may find a Gee, Burns or Paskiewicz next to them in class. Although one of the biggest misconceptions is that all those in the program know each other.

“Someone will ask me, ‘do you know so-and-so?’ And they assume we all hang out together,” Burns said. “I occasionally see a gray-haired person on campus and I’m like, ‘professor or over 62?’”

In that same vein, Gee said he has become friends with a lot of students on the younger side but does not socialize or go out with them outside of class. Burns shares the sentiment that the other undergraduate students aren’t exactly his age group and it would feel strange to get too involved at the university.

Twelve years after his first day at UGA, Gee continues to sit in classes. With his life experiences, wisdom and formal classroom education, he still learns and observes new things everyday.

“I think [my favorite thing] is the optimism the students have [through] all the four years of college experience where they find themselves and [what] they think they want to do,” Gee said. “Although, what you think you want to do doesn’t always turn out [to be] what you end up doing. It’s just fun to be around people who are optimistic about the future.”