I started university for the first time at 55 with Gen Z classmates [Video]

This First Person column is by Colleen Sharpe, who is a second-year student at the University of King’s College in Halifax. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ. 

I grinned to myself as the bus transported me and my new backpack full of books, paper and pens toward campus. It was my first day of realizing a years-long dream. My excitement grew as I got off the bus at a campus stop and found the classrooms.

Going into my small tutorial classroom, I glimpsed students looking expectantly at me as though I were the professor — perhaps a natural assumption since I was the only grey-haired person in the room. But when I took a seat among them instead of at the head of the room, they all quickly looked back down at their phones while I awkwardly riffled through my backpack.

I didn’t just go back to …