It's time to find out what college life is all about

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They're labeled non-traditional college students, but they should be called heroes. Or maybe lunatics.

I've admired them for years: women with a job and a few kids at home who still find the hours in a day to attend a class, work on a paper, hit the books. Men who already have good jobs and fine homes to take care of but feel unfulfilled because they don't have an education.

They go to school at night, on the Web, on the weekends -- whatever it takes to get that precious education.

On Tuesday, at age 31, I found out just how frightening it is to walk into a university admissions office for the first time and ask for an application.

The traditional students were all over the campus.

Many of them looked like they needed showers and were wearing pants large enough to accommodate two teens and a semester's worth of textbooks. Perhaps this will become a new style. "Look, Troy! I got my first pair of 'Buttpacks' by Tommy Hilfiger." The sight of them instantly put me in Old Fogey Mode.

Lucky kids, I thought. Probably going to school on their parents' dimes, enjoying all that liberal ideology you can afford to have at age 19 when your biggest worry is whether you'll pass Friday's algebra test. Wait 'til you get out here in the real world with me, Junior!

Their folks are probably doing everything possible to keep them in school. Mine told me to get a job. A college education would be a waste of time, they said. I'd just end up believing evolution and taking drugs and running around with boys! (I showed them. That last one happened without ever paying for a credit hour.) I accepted my first newspaper job at age 17. I wrote my first paying story the day after I graduated high school. Just like that, I was hooked. College fell by the wayside.

My Old Fogey Mode subsided and I felt a little sorry for those kids when an overzealous admissions worker was shoving forms at me.

"Have you every been a student here before?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"Have you been a student at any college or university?" she asked. "Taken the SAT or ACT?" "No, no and no," I said.

She walked over to the wall of forms and started barking out instructions. "You're going to have to fill out an application. That includes a $20 non-refundable fee.

And you have to take the Asset Test. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah ... ." After the words "fee" and "test," the rest became a blur.

At 31, I had the presence of mind to talk to someone else -- a patient dean who took the time to explain the system and help me pick out my first classes and later another admissions worker who held my hand a little.

At 18, I would have whipped out my checkbook and obediently started writing.

And still later, I felt a little envious of those traditional students. I've decided to be as much like them as possible and try to reclaim my youth -- or at least live university life as I see it.

For example, I want to sit around in dorm rooms and have long conversations about our place in the universe. This will require moving out of the apartment I share with my husband, but I think he will understand.

I want to create a beer bong of some sort and use it frequently.

I want to have an intense relationship with a college boy that ends because we can't agree on the world's best philosopher. And later, when I go back to being married, I want to think of him fondly. Should I get divorced, I want to call him and possibly rekindle our lost love.

I want to flirt with that hot professor in the science department and get a stupid tattoo that will be a strike against me when I get a serious job. (Wait. I did that last one.) Speaking of jobs, I want to do something that requires very little brain activity so I can think about Freud and Jung and how their theories of psychology differed. Also, the job should leave plenty of time for beer bong usage.

And I want my parents to pay my tuition.

Failing in all the above, I will settle for a couple classes a semester, my current job and the cute science professor.

Heidi Hall is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.