Double majors
- Apr 7
- 4 min read
How a mother and son duo inspire lifelong learning in each other.
Written by Casey Couch
"I really think we should encourage people, who either went to college and left or never got the opportunity, that it’s never too late to start.”
Undergraduate student Lucitta Cummings is puzzled. She stares at the Blackboard student tab on her computer and sighs. “School sure wasn’t this tough to navigate 30 years ago,” she thought.
From down the hall, she asks a fellow Cleveland State University (CSU) student for help. The young student teases Cummings for her confusion over the technology, but he still helps.
Then he asks her what’s for dinner. The student is Cummings’ son.
“This is totally new to me, so he has been really helpful,” Cummings, 48, said. “Whenever I call him, even though I annoy him to death, and I’m sure I do, he never turns a blind eye. He will always come and help me.”
Cummings is one of many career-aged individuals at CSU who are breaking the expected age barrier of a typical college student, but is unique in the fact that she attends the university at the same time as her firstborn son.
Life happens
After graduating from Shaw High School in 1994 with a certificate in business occupations, Cummings started her degree at CSU and dreamed of becoming a television news reporter.
“I always liked journalism. I love media, I love journaling,” Cummings, a current journalism major, explained. “When I was in school the first time, I wanted to be a television newscaster and I still honestly like the communication realm.”
Once it became time to declare her major, though, Cummings wasn’t sure. Instead, she made the decision to leave CSU and begin a career at AT&T’s telephone service as a member service representative.
“Life happened,” Cummings said. “I started working and I always said I would go back, but I just started liking the money more than doing homework.”
Part of “life” that happened was becoming a stay-at-home mother to three in 2004, with the birth of her first son. This, unsurprisingly, was a full-time job for Cummings for eight years.
As her children grew older, however, so did her ambition. Cummings began working in human resources for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, where she still works full-time.
The decision to go back to school came when she decided she wanted to finish her degree. The balance of being a full-time online college student whilst working and managing her kids is not easy, but her family is her rock.
“I think I manage it well. I have a good support system,” Cummings said. “My husband is very supportive. It’s hard managing working full-time, being a mom, being a wife and being an active church member.”
Back to school
Luckily for Cummings, she didn’t have to manage the world of higher education alone. Surprisingly, her saving grace was her 20-year-old son, Immanuel Cummings, who is a junior pre-physical therapy major at CSU.
According to Immanuel, he’s happy to share his time at home acting as Cummings’ personal one-man IT team and is very supportive of her ambitions – even if it means saying that he goes to the same school as his mom.
“I think it’s pretty cool that she’s getting her chance to go back to school and chase her dreams of getting a degree,” Immanuel said. “When she first enrolled, I was able to help her with getting onto Blackboard, finding her syllabi and printing them out. It’s just about being her support system, being her tech support and making sure she knows her way around the computer.”
The irony of this situation is not beyond them either. According to Lucitta, the pair spends a lot of time together laughing over the computer whilst trying to navigate the complex world of online college courses.
“The generational gap is definitely humorous,” said Cummings. “He thinks I’m funny and I think he’s funny too. We laugh all the time about that.”
With all jokes aside, Immanuel said that without his mom in school, he would’ve been a first-generation college student. Because of that, he wants to give a shout-out to all the other CSU attendees who are older than the average college student.
“College is for all ages,” Immanuel said. “Being on campus now and sitting in classes, you might see somebody who’s a little older than you. I really think we should encourage people, who either went to college and left or never got the opportunity, that it’s never too late to start.”
His mother agrees, reminding career-aged women that it’s never too late to finish what they started or to try something new. By going back to school while working full-time and being a supportive mother and wife, Cummings hopes to inspire her children and others to finish their goals, and become what she calls a lifelong learner.
“I just think that it’s really important to finish your goals and to finish what you started,” Cummings said. “I started this goal of wanting to complete a degree 30 years ago, and I think that women need to not allow the challenges of age, generational gaps or new technology to interfere with what it is that they feel is part of their purpose. It’s never too late, and I just feel like everyone should be a lifelong learner.”
Below are more photos of the duo posing together at Cleveland State. Credit: Sophia Pantaleano
