A nontraditional approach

It’s been three years since nontraditional UD student Barbara Drabik put away her business suits and left behind a career working for a General Motors franchise. She hasn’t looked back.

Drabik enrolled at UD in fall 2019 as an English major and is a member of the Dean’s Summer Fellowship Program, completing the Berry Honors Summer Thesis program this past summer. She is on track to earn an honors diploma when she graduates in 2024.

Just a few years ago, Drabik had a successful career as a fixed operations director at a Cadillac store located in Cincinnati. Drabik said she took great pride in her staff and helping provide for them what they needed. She would fix the machinery her employees needed to use but would then be reprimanded for the amount of money spent. She said it felt like her work environment was centered around money, rather than compassion.

In her office, she wrote columns intended to persuade leadership to allow female employees to dress professionally instead of mirroring men's clothing. It led to her wanting to write even more. But there was just one problem — she said she really didn’t know how to write.

With a new determination to write novels, Drabik said it was difficult to transform her thoughts into words. She wanted to learn more about writing, so she enrolled at UD because she said she wanted the education necessary to do her ideas justice.

Being a nontraditional student has given Drabik a nontraditional experience on campus, which can be a struggle. For example, she said she often isn’t recognized on campus as a student, but rather as a visitor or guest at the University. 

“But I am a student,” she said. "I'm not trying to be 19/20 years old any more. The whole reason I came is that I want to write novels."

Drabik said she has learned so much from being around younger peers, and she is proud of being nontraditional. She said her writing has flourished, and she’s come a long way. 

Her youngest son is also a UD student, so she appreciates occasionally running into him on campus. “It’s fun to bump into [him] every now and then,” she said.

Drabik’s manuscript, Hotel Metanoia (meaning to rejuvenate or evolve), is her pride and joy. In it, she uses stories from her family’s history of suicide to create a world with a rehabilitation-like version of purgatory. Hotel Metanoia is a place everyone must go after death to work on themselves to restore their character, she said. This was inspired by her unconditional love as a mother, she said.

Drabik also has some of her former employees to thank for the inspiration and for demonstrating to her the range of the human condition. Several of her former GM colleagues were felons, she said. They were also some of the best people she’s ever met.

“Things go wrong sometimes, not because of who we are inside,” she said. “We need to be able to continue to grow.”