May 9 is a big day for Vicky Oldham. She graduates with her bachelor’s degree, 54 years after enrolling in college for the first time. And she turns 71.
Oldham’s journey started as a teenage art student in Pennsylvania and has wound throughout the United States and into different media. Her world has, unsurprisingly, always been filled with art, but in recent years she’s found ways to combine her love of art and biology and untold inspiration in the vistas of the world that surrounds her.
“I never expected to finish school,” she said. “I was one of those people who said, ‘I don’t need a college degree. I have a job.’”
Now on the cusp of graduation, as the Distinguished Senior for NAU Online, she reflected on the lessons she’s learned in school, on the road and in her career and how each has defined and refined her artistry.
Miles and models
After getting married and leaving school, Oldham and her husband worked for different porcelain companies like Franklin Mint and Lenox Collections, creating porcelain prototypes. For the next 30 years, they sculpted. Oldham eventually moved into making resin sculptures while her husband switched to bronze sculpture. She and her husband started their married life and careers in the Philadelphia suburbs, moving to Sedona, Santa Fe, Seattle, Georgia and Florida creating art. They even spent 18 months in Central America after her husband was diagnosed with a terminal lung disease.
“We decided to go to Belize—he always wanted to go to Belize,” she said. “He died there in 2014.”
After his death, she returned to Sedona, where she met her second husband, Tim. She was kinda-sorta retired from her career in sculpture, though still creating art, and decided to go back to school. Oldham was nervous, though, remembering the challenges of the first time. While she’d loved and excelled in her art classes, she’d wanted to double-major in biology but found herself stymied by the math and chemistry classes that accompanied a biology degree.
“That was one reason I thought I could never go back,” Oldham said. “I’m never going to pass math and science.”
When she enrolled in NAU Online’s liberal arts program, she was still nervous about the math and science classes. She tried to channel teenage Vicky’s love of science—she’d dreamed of being a science illustrator when she was younger. One of her first jobs was with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University of Philadelphia, illustrating images of mollusks for research publications and designing seashell-related exhibits for the museum.
Those classes still weren’t easy, 50-odd years later. Oldham remembers opening the book for her first science course—astronomy. The first thing she saw was a slew of equations.
“I started to cry,” she said. “I didn’t know how to make sense of any of it. I thought right off, I’m never going to be able to do this. By the time I was done, I went back to that first course that scared the dickens out of me, and I was able to do it.”
This time around, she had the internet, which enabled her to easily do research, ask for explanations of concepts, walk her through those formulas and break down the complicated parts into manageable pieces. Before, she’d get increasingly lost as the concepts she didn’t understand piled up. This time around, she used the available resources to make sure she understood the basics before moving on.
“You can’t move forward if you don’t understand the building blocks of topics,” Oldham said. “I was so proud of what I was able to finish.”
Why NAU Online?
Becoming a Lumberjack was a no-brainer. Her second husband and all of his children were NAU grads; she wanted to be one, too.
Online education made sense for her; she lives in Prescott, and she and Tim like to travel. NAU Online’s asynchronous model allowed her to move at her own pace and study wherever she was, which often was in their RV somewhere in the Arizona desert.
“I did a lot of my schoolwork at the Grand Canyon,” she said with a laugh. “I look outside and there’s an elk right there as I’m typing away.”
What’s next for the young-at-heart grad
Oldham’s not actually retired; it’s not in her bones. She takes commissions for paintings and sculptures, she leads art activities for the Heritage Park Zoo in Prescott, she’ll be teaching a six-week adult learning course at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the Yavapai College campus, and she created a sculpture program that lives on her DIY sculpting website. One of her latest projects is sculpting with polymer clay and doing livestreams that demonstrate how to sculpt.
“I’m so fortunate,” she said, reflecting on her upcoming big day. “It’s surreal; it really is surreal.”