Campus Connection

Family injuries make road to graduation an emotional uphill battle for December graduate

It was the week before final exams when Tommy Ruzzier called home to Libertyville, Illinois, to talk to his parents. The end-of-year freshman was excited to tell them that he’d just landed a summer job at a chiropractic clinic. His younger sister picked up the phone. She sounded upset. She didn’t know exactly what was going on, but the news wasn’t good. Ruzzier wouldn’t be able to talk to mom and dad. Ruzzier learned that his mother and brother had been in a traffic accident that day while driving to a doctor’s appointment. At a stoplight, a garbage truck smashed into the rear of their Chevy Tahoe. Ruzzier kept calling home to get updates. It appeared after the initial doctor visits, that his mother and brother were badly bumped and bruised, but not severely injured. Ruzzier decided to stay on campus and take his final exams. “It was difficult to keep it together,” he recalls. He went home that summer, and toward the end of break, signs began to emerge that things weren’t quite right. His mother and brother began to struggle with stuttering mid-sentence and a loss of coordination, sometimes bumping into furniture, he says. For the first five weeks of school the following semester, he traveled home and back to UWL every weekend — an eight-hour trip. He would transport his mother and brother to doctor’s appointments, help prepare for the week ahead and be there for emotional support as the family tried to figure out exactly what was wrong. Ruzzier felt drained physically and emotionally, and torn between competing needs at home and school. “When you are separated from people going through difficult times – you can feel guilt, remorse, and relief sometimes, which can lead to guilt again,” he says. Ruzzier contemplated dropping out of school. But, instead of acting on instinct, he reached out to people on campus. His resident assistant — Sara Lang — became a listening ear after tough weekends at home. Tutors at the Counseling and Testing Center helped him make sense of what he was learning in class when it was too difficult to concentrate. Professors and counselors helped him step back from the situation, take a breath, and look at the challenges with a little less emotion and a bit more objectivity. His family needed him, but going home every weekend was wearing him thin and would probably mean dropping out of school. He began to see that focusing on the long-term goal of graduating, would likely help his family more. He decided to visit home less frequently, but found other ways to be emotionally supportive from afar with calls or Skype. He focused on long-term goals like finishing school and finding a career that would help him gain financial independence. In addition to classes, he managed part-time and sometimes full-time work remotely as a project manager for a cloud computing company in Chicago. He picked up additional experience with website redesign for a campus website. His work and academic pursuits made him more interested in a future career in project management in the technology industry. Over time his mother and brother’s conditions have seen some improvement, and he has been able to focus more on the next steps for him. Ruzzier graduates in December and is now exploring job opportunities in project management. At UWL, he’s embraced the mentality that college is not so much about the specific content that shows up on exam day. It’s more about gaining experiences that challenge a person to adapt and grow. Ruzzier certainly learned how to adapt after he made that phone call home his freshman year. But, he’s been able to grow because university staff and classmates challenged him to not give up on his goals. ----- UWL’s Winter Commencement set for Dec. 18  UWL’s Winter Commencement will be Sunday, Dec. 18, at the La Crosse Center, 300 Harborview Plaza. No tickets are required to attend. Seating is on a first come, first serve basis. The ceremony begins for all graduates at 11 a.m. This includes students from the College of Business Administration, College of Liberal Studies, College of Science and Health and School of Education. A total of 695 students are candidates for graduation. This includes 103 graduate students and 592 undergraduates. More information on commencement is at www.uwlax.edu/commencement/