Mother, daughter share college experience

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Sharing angst over mid-term exams and senior projects, a Franklin Park mother and daughter who both will graduate from college next month have bonded as fellow students.

"When I called home ... we both were working on our senior projects," said Kimberly Jackson, 21, who is getting a bachelor's degree in French and Africana Studies from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. "I can call and complain that I am so stressed. She is, like, so totally understanding."

Her mother, Amy Jackson, 50, is getting her second bachelor's degree, a bachelor of science in interior design from La Roche College in McCandless. "I don't feel like age should be a qualification for trying new things. I want people to say, 'OK, I am 50. Can you realize your dream? Can you reinvent yourself?' "

Both mother and daughter have high grade-point averages and have received honors. Amy Jackson was named an Outstanding Student in Higher Education in Pennsylvania. Her daughter recently was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key.

"She sort of inspires me and I inspire her," Amy Jackson said of her daughter. "She will come home for my graduation and I will go to hers."

Kimberly Jackson hopes initially to use her double degree in the Peace Corps or to teach French in a Caribbean locale.

"I would love to work with a nonprofit benefiting women and children in Africa," she said. Her mother hopes to find a job in interior design. "I see design as a way to improve the world and improve myself," she said.

Growing up in Shaler, Amy Jackson said her own mother was determined that she should get a college education. In 1975, she earned a bachelor of arts degree in business administration from Grove City College.

Her first job was on Duquesne University's fund-raising staff, where she learned a lesson about life. "I saw these high-powered executives giving their all to Duquesne, and I saw that it made a difference. That made a big impression on me," she said.

She quit working when she and her husband, Irwin, known as "Bud," decided to start a family. While raising Kimberly and a second daughter, Melissa, now 17, she did volunteer work and helped establish The Glen Montessori School in Emsworth.

As her daughters grew older, she took a personal inventory of her life and decided that interior design was what captured her imagination. She also saw it as a field in which she could help people by designing space for specific groups, such as women's shelters.

When naysayers suggested that she might be too old to pursue a new field, she responded: "Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater at age 68."

Meanwhile, her daughter was developing her own dreams. In her junior year, Kimberly Jackson attended the School for International Training at the University of Bamako in Mali, West Africa, where she worked with a women's cooperative in a village. In 2003, she studied at the National University of Lesotho in Lesotho, South Africa, where she worked with Habitat for Humanity volunteers building houses and latrines.

"My parents were less than thrilled in the beginning," she said, but the family eventually embraced her ideas. Now, her mother even integrates ideas gleaned from her daughter's experiences into her interior design work.

For Amy Jackson, returning to college proved to be challenging. She had to balance school with being a wife and mother as well as providing some care for her elderly parents. She found the interior design program to be more difficult than she anticipated.

"I almost dropped out in my first six weeks. I felt so overwhelmed. I said, 'I just don't think I can do this.' "

With the encouragement of a part-time instructor at La Roche, she stuck it out. She started a mentoring program for new young design students and wrote some personal columns for the school newspaper.

In the six years that it took her to finish her degree, she became a sort of mother figure to younger students. Now, she has some advice for those who may want to try something new.

"My main emphasis is this message: Have a dream and don't be afraid to go for it. Don't say you can't do it because you are 50, 60 or 80."