Non-traditional students at Liberty University talk about their college experience
Gillian Weideman, 25, steps into her American Sign Language classes every day knowing she is surrounded by peers at least five years younger than herself. According to her ASL Degree Completion Plan, Weidman is a junior in her program.
Weidman, originally from South Africa, is also an international student whose family resides in Bahrain, a small island on the southern coast of Saudi Arabia.
Because Weidman does not fit into the average college age of 18 to 22, she is considered a non-traditional student. Although Weideman has not been to a prom since 2012, she still tries to find some commonality with her younger peers.
“I come here and work with people who are 18 to 19 and fresh out of high school and it is actually easy to relate to them just because like I may be older, but we are all going to college,” Weidman said. “We are all in the same classes, so we are somewhat at the same level of where we want to go degree wise and career wise.”
Weideman started her education with Liberty as an online student in 2014, taking general education classes before she settled on a career path. During this time of consideration, Weideman worked with her mom at a preschool and traveled frequently throughout Saudi Arabia.
“Professors would send me daily devotionals and prayers, and it was such a 180 from what I am used to (in Saudi Arabia),” Weideman said. “I knew I needed to immerse myself into Liberty so that’s why I decided to come to Lynchburg to finish my degree.”
Like Weideman, several non-traditional students walk alongside traditional college students pursuing their own degrees in higher education, but many find it difficult to be a part of a community that relates to them.
Tony Halufska, 32, started attending Liberty in 2015 at the age of 28, pursuing a degree in youth ministry. During Halufska’s first round of college, he attended Southeastern University, but he left after getting a divorce. Before deciding to come back to school, Halufska worked for five years as an assistant branch manager for Stanley Steemer in Florida.
“After a while, I started to have this burning desire in my heart to start serving and doing what God has for me again,” Halufska said.
Halufska said the hardest part about transitioning from the work force into university life was the funds. Since he was well established in his career, Halufska had his own house and his own money that made him financially independent, but after coming to Liberty, Halufska said he felt like he had jumped back 10 years.
“I came up here and I was 28 but then I felt like I was 18 again,” Halufska said. “I had no money and it took me like two months before I got a job.”
While Halufska did not have a strong desire to live in the dorms and be surrounded by his younger peers, he realized that there is a sense of community among students who live on campus that off campus students do not typically have.
According to the Executive Director of Student Life, Ted Whitney, most, if not all, non-traditional students are commuter students due to the 25-year-old age restriction set for on-campus living. Because of the age difference, many non-traditional students find themselves without the same community that traditional students have.
“We look to engage all off-campus students to their university, to each other, faculty and campus activities,” Whitney said. “We want to give off-campus students a comparable service to what students living on campus have.”
According to IPEDS, over 50 percent of Liberty students taking classes on campus during the 2019 spring semester are commuter students, totaling 7,600 students. Because the population of commuter students is larger than the number of on-campus students, people like Whitney spend a lot of their time focusing on how to get this majority engaged into campus activities.
“Once you get connected, you feel like you are on a team and you can do it,” Whitney said. “You get more support from your university and you realize ‘I know 100 commuters now than just me.’”
Although Student Affairs provides spaces and events for non-traditional students to cultivate friendships, Kyle Vatt, 30, chooses to find his community outside of Liberty. Vatt is a senior at Liberty, studying digital media performance and works for Liberty Flames Sports Network. Before coming to Liberty, Vatt worked for Panera Bread Company as a training specialist in the Louisiana area.
Vatt said he is not at Liberty to be a part of a community but to create his own community. Many times, Vatt sees the events aimed toward commuters as only a way to make Student Affairs look better. Instead of participating in Liberty commuter events, Vatt spends time creating friendships with people around Lynchburg.
“It’s important for students to know if you are going to be involved with commuter students, you are going to be a part of community that is healthy but it also going to be a community that is closed off to other things,” Vatt said “I know kids at Lynchburg College who are just as awesome, and I want to create community with them, because they at least understand and are outside the Liberty bubble.”
For both Weideman and Halufska, going to commuter tailgates was how they were able to get engaged to the commuter community, and within that meeting other non-traditional students.
“I found this tent that said commuter student life and one of the guys I met added me on Facebook and then he would send me invites for events that were purely for commuters,” Halufska said.
Another place where Halufska and Weideman have found a space to connect is the commuter lounge located in Green Hall. According to Whitney, the commuter lounge receives around 700 visits a day.
“Most of the non-tradtionals I met just felt weird and awkward,” Halufska said. “Now because we have the lounge, there is a better community of non-traditional students.”
In regard to the commuter lounge, Vatt said nothing changed when the lounge was built and that it was just one more place for him to study. Vatt sees his classmates less as potential friends but more as colleagues in a professional setting.
“I don’t have friends here because they are not at my level of life, and I can’t relive my 24 to 30-year-old self,” Vatt said. “The times that I have struggled most in college over the last few years have been times that I have reverted as if I am a 22 year old student because I have been hanging around 22 year olds and soaking in their bad habits.”
Vatt says he wants to be surrounded by people who are not like him and people he can learn from, but he says Liberty creates a bubble of people who look like, act like and talk like each other, minimalizing students’ abilities to think differently.
Despite students like Halufska and Vatt having different approaches in how they cultivate their own community, both acknowledge the importance of being intentional when they seek out new friendship whether that be on campus or out in the Lynchburg community.
“It was hard being up here and not living on campus and not having a hall and those people that I could assume community with, so I had to be very intentional about reaching out and seeing people,” Halufska said.