Jodi Carrasco wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and starts her day by running on a treadmill for a couple hours. She takes her 16-year-old daughter to school and then goes to school herself.
At 48 years old, Carrasco works 30 hours a week and goes to school full time. She’s working toward a bachelor’s in sociology and has two semesters left.
“It would have been a whole lot easier if I started college back in the 80s after I graduated high school,” she said. “But I got married, we had children, and life kind of happens to you. School went to the back-burner.”
On top of the class load and the work hours, Carrasco is recently widowed and cares for three children. Her husband, Mike Carrasco,
became a quadriplegic after a 2006 car wreck, and he died of complications this year. Carrasco said the state paid her to take care of her husband, and his death also brought emotional and financial burden.
“Sometimes just getting up in the mornings is hard,” Carrasco said. “He was my biggest cheerleader. He helped me with my math classes. And he was here.”
Still, she soldiers on for her children.
One of her children goes to school at Eastern New Mexico University, and two live at home. Carrasco said she doesn’t have much time to spend with her children, particularly her youngest daughter, Selah, who goes to high school in Rio Rancho.
Despite her mother having less free time, Selah said her mother has inspired her.
“I think it’s pretty cool,” she said. “It’s great to have my mom go back and get a degree in what she wants to do. And it makes me want to go to school to do what I want.”
To pay for school, Carrasco works as an administrative assistant at the Anderson School of Management, and she has taken out student loans.
“It’s pretty much slave labor,” Carrasco said, laughing. “I’m going be paying off student loans until I’m old and gray, which probably isn’t very far away.”
Despite the challenge, she said she tries to remain undaunted, and admits other people have it a lot harder. She said she is returning to school because that’s her only option to stay afloat amid changing times.
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“Back then, you could get a decent job that pays fairly well without a degree,” she said. “You can’t do that anymore. If you think about it and tell yourself it’s a lot, then you won’t be able to do it. You just do it. You do what you need to do and get it done.”
