Finally done! Viva Barnes took one class a quarter for 21 years to earn her degree from WWU

There were times when Viva Barnes never thought her one-class-at-a-time plan to earn a bachelor’s degree would result in a diploma.

But after 21 years, the administrative services manager in WWU’s Anthropology Department walked across the stage in Carver Gym Saturday to receive not one but two degrees: bachelors of arts in Spanish and Creative Writing.

“If I could do a happy dance, I would,” Barnes said. “No more homework!”

Barnes, 55, began taking one course each quarter in 1988, the year her daughter was in kindergarten. Then a cashier at WWU and a single mom, Barnes would tuck her little girl into bed at the end of a full work day and begin her school work. She spent the next 21 years chipping away at her degree, class by class, year by year and decade by decade.

Along the way she changed her educational interests from business and Japanese to Spanish and creative writing. She changed jobs, too, moving from the University Cashier to the Office of Admissions and finally to the Anthropology Department.

Meanwhile, Barnes’s little girl grew up, went to college and had a baby of her own.

“Are you still taking classes?” friends and colleagues asked Barnes over the years.

So many people on campus have supported her, she said. “It will be nice to let everyone know I graduated.”

If it were up to Barnes’s parents, she would have gone to college after graduating from high school in Cupertino, Calif.

But instead, she left home at 18 to move to Washington state with her boyfriend, whom she later married then divorced.

“It was the early ‘70s,” she said. “Everyone was going off to find themselves. I found myself broke.”

She couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition. So she focused on the sign business she ran with her husband and made plans to earn her degree someday.

That someday came almost 23 years ago when she started working at WWU. Staff tuition waivers, which allowed her to take classes tuition-free, were a blessing, she said. So were supervisors who allowed her the flexibility to make up the work time she spent in class.

She knew taking time off work to attend school full-time would help her finish her degree more quickly, but she didn’t think she could afford it as a single parent.

So she kept “chunking away,” she said.

But just like the 1,399 other staff members who have taken classes with tuition waivers during the past decade, Barnes had to wait until the first day of classes to register. So it was sometimes a couple of weeks into the quarter before she knew there would be room for her in the class she needed.

“Several times I said, ‘Why am I doing this again?’” Barnes said.

She remembers trying to memorize trigonometry equations or Japanese syllable systems by writing them on the back of index cards and spreading them across her living room floor. She’d occasionally throw those cards in the air out of frustration. Her Japanese-American mom was proud that Barnes was learning some Japanese, though she laughed a little at her daughter’s accent. But the more time she put into her degree, the more she wanted to finish.

She wanted to honor her parents and grandparents, who spent time in Japanese-American relocation camps during World War II. And she wanted to honor her parents, who always encouraged her to attend college. Barnes is the first in three generations on her side of the family to earn a bachelor’s degree, she said.

“In a way, it’s a tribute to (my family),” she said. “I don’t think I would be where I am without all their support.”

With her degrees completed, Barnes now hopes to spend more time with her granddaughter. But she hasn’t given up the habit of learning. She would still like to spend more time on creative writing and learn to play the piano. She considered graduate school, but isn’t sure she needs a master’s degree.

Besides, she said, she’s not sure she could complete it before she retires.