Albertha
Merriman began her undergraduate degree at the tender age of 58.
At the time, she had just finished her ordination and was continuing on the ministerial staff at St. Paul's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Central Square, where she has been a member since 1970. "I do preaching, teaching, baptizing, 'funeralizing,' the sacraments," she says, as well as counseling. A number of parishioners would ask, "Oh girl, when are you going back to school?" she recalls.
Albertha deferred that decision. For 17 years, she worked as a cytotechnologist, screening Pap smears and performing diagnostic research on cancer cells at Cambridge Hospital and Boston City Hospital. Then she began her ordination, also working in private baby nursing, teaching first-time parents to care for newborns. When one of Albertha's adopted daughters graduated Cambridge College in 1995, she urged Albertha to attend.
Though Albertha, who hails from a family of "nurses, teachers, police officers -- and there was one lawyer," she says, had dreams of going to college, she had put those on hold with the birth of her first child. Then, "I was saying I was too old; I was afraid of the writing," she recalls.
Finally, she applied. "I realized that age is just a number," she says. After starting in 1995, she graduated in 1999 with a degree in psychology. From there, she enrolled in the Master's counseling program, and graduated in June 2002 -- just a few months shy of her 65th birthday -- with a concentration in family and marriage therapies. "The goal is to go back and get my doctorate at some point," she says.
In August, she began her new career as a counseling therapist, working at the South Bay Mental Health in Brockton, Mass. "I love people," she says. "I'm there to help empower them, because the system sometimes beats them down, or their own families beat them down, and they need someone at some point who can say, You can do it, regardless of what their situation might be, to let them know that there is still hope for them," says Albertha.
Cambridge
College offered her similar support, especially the instructors. "I've
gotten such good teaching," she says. Albertha benefited from other
kinds of backing as well. "In my undergraduate program, I got a lot
of scholarships, and some people might say, $3,000 is not a lot of money,
but for me it was," she notes. "I pray, and I've said it before
and I say it again, I hope that at some point in my life, I can come into
some money, so that I can be a blessing to Cambridge College, because
they were there for me," she says. "I would highly recommend
Cambridge College."
Next: Benjamin Thompson