Seven years after she retired from the Royal Bank of Canada, ending a thirty-seven-year career, Yvonne Blackwood surprised her friends and family by returning to school to pursue an English degree. She craves knowledge and is motivated by four powerful reasons: To add texture to her writing; to ward off dementia by exercising her brain muscles with her studies; to add ongoing structure to her life by attending classes regularly; to inspire her two young grandsons to attend university full-time when they graduate from high school. Blackwood attends Canada's third-largest university and struggles with maintaining her established lifestyle, being in class with hard-to-connect-with millennials, and a shocking diagnosis in her final year. She writes, “What I didn't know was how much the pursuit of the degree would inform me, challenge me, satisfy me, and drive me to consider giving up on more than one occasion.”