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Sitting on the front row in her college classes carefully taking notes, Nola Ochs is just as likely to answer questions as to ask them. That’s not the only thing distinguishing her from fellow students at Fort Hays State University. She’s 95, and when she graduates May 12, she’ll be what is believed to be the world’s oldest person to be awarded a college degree.
She didn’t plan it that way. She just loved to learn as a teenager on a Hodgeman County farm, then as a teacher at a one-room school after graduating from high school and later as a farm wife and mother.
“That yearning for study was still there. I came here with no thought of it being an unusual thing at all,” she said. “It was something I wanted to do. It gave me a feeling of satisfaction. I like to study and learn.”
The record Ochs will break, according to Guinness World Records, belongs to Mozelle Richardson, who at age 90 in 2004 received a journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma.
By Carl Manning, Associated Press, Last update: April 27, 2007 – 5:56 AM read more here [...]
“She’s also living testimony to the contribution a healthy lifestyle can make to longevity and vitality.
“I don’t come from a particularly long lived family,” says Ochs,” …
A full-time student at Fort Hays, Ochs lives in an apartment on campus and enjoys walking for exercise. During school breaks and on occasional weekends, she drives 100 miles to her farm…. Read more [...]
and the earlier story here,
FHSU’s most senior student celebrates birthday, Thursday November 30, 2006, Robert Cummins
During the break, senior Nola Ochs celebrated her birthday. She’s 95, and she reflected on her first semester at FHSU.
“I’ve had a good time,” she said. “I’ve worked like a beaver, but that’s what I came here for.”
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yet another Tolstoy’s cycling scholars–
Great-great-granny gains MSc at 94
Bernard Lagan in Sydney, From The Times, August 4, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2194523.ece
Nola Ochs, MA
Nola Ochs, who held the title of world’s oldest college graduate until last year following her graduation from Fort Hays State University at the age of 95, is scheduled to receive her master’s in liberal studies with a history concentration from the Hays, Kan., school Saturday, the Kansas City (Mo.) Star reported Wednesday.
On Saturday, with gobs of family members in the audience wearing gray T-shirts sporting her name and waving the American flags she requested, the great-grandmother of 15 will get her master’s degree. Don’t forget, she’s 98 now.
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/05/11/1940260/98-year-old-kansan-is-getting.html