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SIUC graduates ready to face future

BY SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE SOUTHERN

Sunday, May 11, 2008 9:26 AM CDT

CARBONDALE - Southern Illinois University Carbondale graduating seniors Janiece Blake and Kelli Jensen have much in common, even though they do not know each other.

Both received bachelor's degrees Saturday. They are both single moms. And both are excited about their futures.

The road each is going to travel now to reach career goals is where the stories begin to differ.

Jensen, who is getting her degree in social work, is already making preparations to begin an intensive master's degree program that she wants to complete in a single year.

"You don't go into social work for money," she said with a laugh about how she sees herself in the future. "I want to open my own therapy practice."

Blake has a job waiting for her in Bloomington with State Farm Bank, where she begins June 2 as a finance trainee in financial operations and compliance. She leaves SIUC's College of Business with an accounting degree and has been on the dean's list all eight semesters.

The opportunity is something she has been molding for more than a year. She initially attended an SIUC job fair in 2006, where she had an interview with a State Farm representative. Blake had an internship with the company last summer.

"I figured if I did what I needed to do, like keeping good grades, everything would fall into place," Blake said.

Both women have overcome adversity to get where they are today.

Raising children while attending school full time is a tough task, but neither thought twice about the task.

"My life is definitely full of chaos. If I had time for a nervous breakdown, I would have had one," Jensen said.

The mother of a boy, Chandler, 9, and a girl, Zoe, 6, Jensen has worked as a hairstylist to make ends meet. She initially started her studies at John A. Logan College before transferring to SIUC.

She's held jobs in human resources departments and attended cosmetology school in Marion. After her divorce six years ago, Jensen stood at a crossroads in her life.

"I decided to go back to school and do what I really wanted to do," she said.

Blake knew from the start, while a student at Meridian High School in Mound City, that she was destined to be an accountant.

"We had a project in high school and I was 2 cents off on the trial balance. I had a dream about the accounting assignment that night and came up with the answer," Blake said.

She lived in the SIUC dormitories her first two years, but then commuted every school day from Mound City to Carbondale and back so she could raise her children, Jaylen, 5, and Brynn, who was born in November.

Both graduating seniors credit their parents and relatives for helping them take care of their children.

And both know their particular fields of study offer challenges they like and are ready to embark upon.

Jensen's first major was criminal psychology, and she was leaning toward forensics when she began college before getting married in 1993. Now that she's decided upon social work, she sees a new world in mental health.

"That was the direction I decided I would take. I don't know where it will lead me," Jensen said.

With SIUC's College of Business getting recent approval from the Board of Trustees for differential tuition to enhance its job placement opportunities for COB students like herself, Blake advises business school administrators and faculty members to look beyond opportunities in public accounting.

"They should look outside the realm of public accounting and broaden the field or horizon of what field you can work in with an accounting degree such as private industry and companies," Blake said.

scott.fitzgerald@thesouthern.com / 351-5076