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Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of profiles of Spring 2024 graduates.

Elizabeth Blakesley will be easy to spot at graduation ceremonies at University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC). She is the Bachelor of Arts candidate with a mortarboard bearing two hand-drawn caricatures, one of herself and the other of her father, who did not live to see his youngest child complete her academic journey.

Blakesley said the drawings harken back to a day more than 40 years ago when her father scolded the then 7-year-old girl and sent her to her room. Furious, she looked out the window and saw him in a lawn chair outside, reading a copy of National Geographic. She grabbed paper and pencil and immediately began sketching a picture of him.

“I drew him as mean as I could and added pounds to him and then took the drawing out and handed it to him,” Blakesley recalled. “He burst into laughter and laughed hard for about 20 minutes, tears running down his cheeks. But he was also amazed at how realistic it looked and he encouraged me to do more caricatures.

“It was the moment I realized I loved art, and it was because of him.” 

That passion for art and design has culminated in a university degree focused on graphic design and communications—30 years after her first bid to get a degree was interrupted by financial concerns.

In high school, Blakesley excelled in math and science and graduated with honors.

“I was the youngest of six children, and my parents could not afford to put me through college. They told me I needed to get a scholarship,” Blakesley explained. “I worked hard in high school and was offered a scholarship to University of Maryland Baltimore County and one from Roanoke College, in Salem, Virginia, but I felt that both those schools were just too far away. At the time, my dad had been diagnosed with cancer and I didn’t want to leave home.”

She enrolled at University of Maryland College Park but only made it through a year of coursework before she ran out of money.

So, she started working at a mortgage company in Lanham, Maryland, as a receptionist and then, as she put it, “life happened.” In 1996, she tried college again—this time Frederick Community College—a year after the birth of her first child, but she found that adding classes to a life that already included a young son and a full-time job proved too ambitious. In 2003, she had her second child, a daughter.

“Going to college was always in my head but by that point, there was just too much going on in my life. And the more time that went by, the more I distanced myself from the idea of getting a degree,” Blakesley said. “Then I became a single mom.”

A further setback came in 2015 when her father died of colon cancer.

“He had been my biggest supporter in life, the one who pushed me educationally, the reason I did so well in school,” she said.

Time rolled forward and Blakesley soon found herself helping her daughter figure out where she wanted to attend college.

“I helped her to look at different schools and helped her fill out her financial aid forms, and I started to feel that drive again to go back to school. It was around COVID, my son had joined the Army, and I saw that there was this college—UMGC—that offered online classes.”

Blakesley reentered higher education by way of Laurel Ridge Community College in Middletown, Virginia, the same school where her daughter enrolled. In 2022, she transferred her credits to UMGC.

“As my life progressed, I found that my love of art was greater than my interest in science and math. I am an artist. My mom was an artist,” Blakesley said. “So, I decided to pursue a graphic design degree so I could use my art in a digital form.”

When she steps up on stage at Grad Walk, with members of her family watching, she becomes the first in her family to complete a college degree. Even more, she graduates with a 4.0 grade point average and was recently inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi honor society and Alpha Sigma Lambda, which recognizes exceptional adult learners.

She already knows the skills she has picked up at ��������will be helpful in her job. “My company has been supportive of me and I know this will lead to new opportunities,” she said.

Blakesley said she had an important wake-up moment in a required math course at UMGC. “It was a difficult math class and for the first time in my life I felt I couldn’t be successful at it,” she said. “But the professor I had really worked with me and answered my questions along the way, which is one of the reasons I love UMGC. I realized that if you put your mind to it and try, it’s possible to learn even the hardest things.”

Her final grade in the class? An ‘A.’ 

Blakesley said her degree was possible thanks to the support of her husband, Michael, and her three children, who will be with her at Grad Walk. After the ceremony, Blakesley and her family plan to congregate at Topolino, an Italian restaurant in Temple Hills, Maryland.

“It was my dad’s favorite restaurant. He took us there when anything momentous happened,” Blakesley said. “It was one of my father’s greatest goals that one of his six children attended and graduated from college. I feel like he’s been with me since the first classes I took in elementary school."