College is a big step in one's life that can ultimately lead to some amazing opportunities. Most people attempt to tackle the beast of college right after high school, but some opt to do so later in life for various reasons. Those people are called non-traditional students. The term does apply to a few other ways of being a student, such as working full time while only going to school part time, but most people in today's world consider that more of a traditional student then not. College is expensive after all, and loans are a debt sentence everyone is trying vehemently to avoid.

I started my college career as a traditional student after having been a non-traditional high school student. I had gone to an internet homeschool, but when I started to fall behind because of life and laziness, I ultimately ended up getting my GED so I could attend college. It's safe to say I did not do well and ended up failing out after my first year. It took a couple years, and a semester at Sinclair, but I eventually returned to Wright State once again, this time better equipped to handle college and the challenges that come with it. However, I was no longer a traditional student for an undergraduate. I was entering in as a sophomore at age 24, which put me quite a few years older than all my traditional student classmates. Most non-traditional students are at a later part of life, many attending in order to obtain a promotion or enter a new field of work. While there are some my age, and that number has been growing more in recent years, I was still very much a minority as a student. Most of the people my age were working on graduate programs to obtain their master's or Ph.D.

This creates a sort of disconnect while you're attending college, as most of your traditional classmates are just young enough that you can't quite connect with them, and your non-traditional ones are so far ahead of you in life that you don't really fit in with them. While one group is talking about the next party they're going to, the other is talking about a PTO meeting and their kid's soccer tournament next weekend. A lot of the school's focus on activities and events are also focused on traditional students, which can lead you to feeling left out a lot. I've also experienced many times when I'd invite classmates to go hang at a bar with me and some friends only to receive "oh, I'm only 20, sorry" as a reply, a fact easily forgotten because you do spend so much time with these people and you tend to think if you can do something, so can they.

That's not to say it's all bad though. Most of my professors tend to treat me as more of a professional and speak to me more like a college than just a student since they know I'm planning to one day myself be standing where they are. Administrators tend to take an issue I bring to them more seriously, and those graduate students talk to me on the same level they do their classmates, making the assumption that I will be able to keep up simply because I've got more time and experience under my belt than your traditional student would.

College is definitely not for everyone, and a lot of whether you should go or not will depend purely on who you are and what your goals in life are. But if you've been thinking about it, I can tell you from experience, even being a non-traditional non-traditional student is worth the end result you get no matter when you decide to attend. I have a little over a semester left in my undergraduate, and the opportunities I've had while attending alone have been worth every frustration and setback, and there will only be more doors opening in the future. My only recommendation is try to acquire a taste for coffee. It'll make the long nights of homework and studying a whole lot easier to handle.