Toni Lindsey took a break one day from her job driving a bus for UD and strode into the CHNS dean's office.

"Is there anybody who can talk to me about nursing?" she asked.

Her gumption got her where she is today--a junior nursing major at age 43. It's the same intrepid attitude that carried her through college chemistry and microbiology without benefit of such high school courses as college-prep algebra and chemistry. It helped her make her way to Africa on a medical mission, even though she had never traveled outside the United States before.

When Lindsey, HNS 2003, sets a goal for herself, she goes after it headlong.

That was the case when she decided, as a 30-year-old mother of three boys, that she was ready to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a police officer. She made it into the New Castle County (Del.) Police Academy on the first try and trained 12 hours a day with recruits in their early 20s, most of whom had been to college. She did countless push-ups and sit-ups.

Once on the force, she found herself disappointed. When she went on calls for domestic violence, she wanted to counsel victims to help them stop patterns of abuse. "I was frustrated that I wasn't able to serve people as I really wanted," she says. "The things that I thought I needed to do for victims I wasn't allowed to do."

One night, while sitting in the back of an emergency vehicle with the victim of a sexual assault, she had an epiphany. As she watched rescue workers check the woman's vital signs, she saw that they could interact with a victim in a way a police officer could not. She quit the force, intent on pursuing a medical career.

Her family's finances were tight, and she had heard that UD employees may take classes for free. Since she once drove a bus for a private school her sons attended, she signed on as a University bus driver.

College courses didn't daunt her, even though she had graduated from high school with, she says, "horrible grades." Back then, her parents were going through a divorce, and high school "just seemed really unimportant," she says. After her sophomore year, she told administrators at Newark (Del.) High School she wanted to drop out. At their suggestion, she instead completed junior English in summer school, skipped to her senior year and graduated a year early. She tried college elsewhere but got homesick, returned to Delaware and met and married her husband, Jamie, at 18.

More than 20 years later, as a part-time college student and full-time bus driver, she decided she wasn't getting to her nursing goal fast enough. So, she sought advice in the dean's office.

Associate Dean Pamela B. Beeman helped Lindsey win a full scholarship, enabling her to take classes full time. "She's been awesome," Lindsey says of Beeman.

Then, her husband was laid off from his job, and Lindsey wondered if she should go back to work. "You need to stay in school," Jamie Lindsey told her. They made it through the financial crisis.

The next hurdle was the dreaded Chemistry 105 and 106. She says she barely knew what a periodic table was. Other students couldn't believe she had never had algebra and other prerequisites; some of them had completed advanced-placement chemistry in high school. She panicked as she waited for the first exam to begin. "I had quit my job. We had put everything on the line," she says.

But, she passed. She says she has classmates Erin Halfen and Christine Monaghan, both HNS 2003, to thank for walking her through tough spots in her courses. Coincidentally, Halfen had known Lindsey's middle son, Jonathan, now age 20, in high school. "It is too weird that my mother is going to school with my friends," Jonathan tells his mom. She says the younger students at UD have been gracious and accepting. For her part, she guards against what she calls "the Mom factor," even when she hears them talking about drinking and other behavior she knows they'd be better off avoiding.

Lindsey has run into old acquaintances from her days as a bus driver, when she mostly drove a Unicity route frequented by residents of Main Towers. For her first clinical rotation, she was assigned to perform health assessments at the residence for senior citizens. "Sure enough, there were several people there who rode my bus," she says.

Any doubts she might have had about her new vocation were dispelled on her mission trips to Africa. She heard about the Zambia Medical Missions, based in Texas, from a friend at church. Lindsey had always dreamed of going to Africa, and the missions enable her to use her fledgling medical knowledge. On the first trip, she had to make her way to Zambia by herself, after an airline strike caused her to miss a connection with the rest of the group. Despite the hitch, she says, the experience was so fulfilling that she has returned two more times.

"I act as a triage nurse when I go. We're a roaming unit. We go village to village," she says, adding that she loves sleeping out in the bush – even when a couple of lions wandered near the camp one night.

Lindsey manages to fit in mission trips around her courses, studying and family time. Besides Jonathan, who is in college himself, she is the mother of 24-year-old Joshua and 13-year-old Ben. She even finds time to volunteer with Ben's youth group at church.

And, as if she didn't have enough going on in her life, she works part time in the Department of Nursing office. She hopes to learn research methods by observing and assisting her professors.

It's unrealistic to expect a grueling career as a hospital nurse when she'll be 45 by the time she graduates, she says. Instead, she aims to continue into a master's program, possibly at UD, and then conduct research herself. "I'm intensely interested in women's health," she says.

"If I can get through chemistry, I can do anything else. If I can get through microbiology, I can go to graduate school."

Her enthusiasm for learning fuels her energy. "I feel like I've been soaking it up, like I've been a dry sponge and somebody's finally giving me water," she says. "I didn't get to do this the first time around."

--Sandy Dennison-James