Denise Botti:
CLASS OF 1981
Laurel Highlands High SchoolClass of 1981
Uniontown, PA
Denise's Story
Life
After 20 years of bouncing around from job to job, I finally got the opportunity to attend college. I enrolled in the Occupational Therapy Assistant program at California University of Pennsylvania. In three years I changed majors three times and am now a junior in the Gerontology B.S. program with a projected graduation date of December 2006.
Currently, I am also working as a certified home health aide with a company located in Hopwood. I am very happy with my job and I enjoy taking care of my elderly clients. My goal with my degree is that I am going to be able to get into an agency in which I continue to help the older people in Fayette County.
My gerontology instructor at Cal is working on an online master's program as well and I am planning on continuing my education as soon as possible after receiving my bachelor's.
Making the decision to return to school was easy but getting back into the routine was extremely difficult. I had a really hard time adjusting to some of my classes and studying. Of course, writing papers is the worst!!!! I hate having to do them,
but they are necessary and I usually do well on them once I get started. I have been able to keep my GPA at a respectable level since my second semester. :)
The younger students that I have met since starting school have been so fantastic. The age di...Expand for more
fference has never been a factor to them and I have learned a lot from them. Sometimes we have a generation gap when referring to history or music but mostly we jsut laugh about it. There were times when I was older than all of my instructors as well.
This past spring semester I spent part of my classtime in a practicum at a community center in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh. I worked with the director of adult programming and I assisted her in her duties as well as planning two full projects of my own. It was a great experience and I met a lot of wonderful people there. I will be doing a longer internship next spring but as yet I do not know where.
I recently spent a week in the mountains of Northwest PA at a women's conference on leadership. The conference was sponsored by the Women's Consortium and I received a scholarship from them and my school to attend the conference. It was the most amazing experience of my life. There were women from about nine other schools within the State System Of Higher Education so there were 26 of us all together plus the three instructors. Again we had an age range in students from 19 to 60 years of age and the gap in our ages made no difference at all.
It has been a long, hard road and I still have a way to go but I am very excited about what I have accomplished so far.
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