Dad, daughter share journeys
SLIPPERY ROCK — College graduation season is a time of celebration for parents across the country. But Michael Gregory of Freeport and his daughter, Chenoa, have more reasons to celebrate than most.
Both Gregorys — 49-year-old Michael and 23-year-old Chenoa — will receive degrees from Slippery Rock University next month. Michael is completing his master's degree in clinical mental health counseling. Chenoa is wrapping up an award-winning student career with a bachelor of arts degree in studio arts.
SRU isn't the first school the Gregorys have attended together. The pair started their college careers at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
And while Chenoa's path to a college degree is one shared by thousands of students across the country, Michael's has been anything but traditional.
It was 2009 and Gregory was working as a truck driver — a job he never envisioned moving on from — when an Achilles tendon injury took him off the job and got him thinking about the future. Was driving a truck what Gregory, then 41, wanted to do for the rest of his life? He wasn't so sure.
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“I wanted to do something where I was impacting other peoples' lives in a positive way,” he said. “I didn't want to chase money around in a box anymore. I really wanted to do something different.”
Gregory enrolled at Butler County Community College and spent three semesters there, planning to become a nurse, before ultimately transferring to IUP, where he majored in psychology and minored in philosophy. The experience was at times jarring for a man in his early 40s, who was remaking his entire life while surrounded with 20-somethings just starting theirs in earnest. But Gregory said his years at IUP proved to be a crucible that focused his desire to better the world.
“I was really focused on 'what do I want my life to be about?',” he said. “I had this existential crisis at age 41, and wanted to know I would leave this world a better place than I found it.”
Gregory wouldn't take his leap of faith alone. Chenoa, as a senior at Freeport High School, had already joined her father in one IUP class — a history course she took as part of the school's college-in-high-school program. After Freeport's graduation, Chenoa decided to join Michael at IUP as a full-time student and pursue a bachelor of arts degree.
With a head start of several years on his daughter, Gregory graduated from IUP and began working at Gateway Rehab as a full-time drug and alcohol counselor — another turn he never expected his career to take. Addiction counseling had never really appealed to Gregory, but colleagues at Gateway sparked both his interest in the field and his admiration for SRU's program.
“I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my degree until I met (SRU) students that were here (at Gateway),” he said. “The work that they were doing and the training they had gotten here was just amazing to watch. They kind of pulled me in and brought me along with them.”
The same inertia that pulled Gregory to SRU's master's program for clinical mental health counseling pulled Chenoa to the school as well. She transferred into the university's studio arts program, and will also graduate in May, marking the end of an award-winning tenure at SRU.
Through an internship with the university's public relations department, Chenoa has designed numerous advertising and event packages for SRU, winning multiple awards through the Higher Education Marketing Report's annual Educational Advertising Awards.
The awards are great, Chenoa said, but experiencing college alongside her father is something nothing can top.
“It was the best decision I ever made,” she said of coming to SRU. “I feel like we did it together, which is a great feeling. He's my parent ... but he was also my partner through the schooling process.”
For Gregory, who last month became Gateway's full-time family therapist and continues to drive trucks in his spare time, the future seems more wide open to possibilities than ever before. In two years, he'll be eligible to receive state licensing and strike out on his own in private practice, if he so desires.
Gregory, who turned 49 on Friday, says it's another leap he's not afraid to make. He wants to eventually expand beyond drug and alcohol treatment as well. For now, though, Gregory is going to enjoy celebrating with the one person he's been able to count on through the entire journey.
“It's just kind of been me and her (Chenoa) against the world,” he said. “So it's exciting that we're at this place together, too.”
