By Brittany Rogers

Above image courtesy Ensign College

Following a series of setbacks, Brandee Nadauld dove back into her education.

In a sea of black caps and gowns, Brandee Nadauld’s bedazzled mortarboard sparkled with a rhinestone shark.

For the new grad—a mom of seven, grandma of five—the shark was a nod to how far she’d come since her lowest point after her 2016 divorce.

“I felt beat down,” Nadauld explains. “I felt like my value was absolutely zero.” She didn’t know how she’d afford to keep her home. Her children, then ages 7 to 22, were struggling.

At some point in the upheaval, Nadauld found herself watching Shark Week on TV. The sharks on the program had “all these scars,” she says, which researchers used to identify them. “I just thought, you know, ‘I have these scars, and that’s okay. That makes you who you are. You can have scars and still be worth something.’ ”

Photo by Bradley Slade

It was a pivot point for Nadauld.

The shift in mindset came amidst other stepping stones. In the aftermath of the divorce, her ward had rallied to convert her West Bountiful, Utah, basement into a rentable apartment. She went on to land a job managing a jewelry store. Things were tight but stable; she could breathe again.

And then her bishop started giving her the nudge: “Have you thought about Ensign?”

Nadauld, married at 18, hadn’t set foot in a classroom since high school. Fighting self-doubt, she applied.

Ensign College boasts a 91 percent acceptance rate. There are less expensive online-only options, but Ensign has the least expensive campus-based tuition of any school in the Church Educational System.

Even so, Nadauld’s voice breaks when she describes the Stella Harris Oaks Single Parent Scholarship she received from the school.

“It was just a wave of immense relief,” she says. There would be no “burden of a loan that was going to kill me at the end.”

Another relief: seeing other students her age on campus.

A third of Ensign College’s students are nontraditional, many of them parents. Nadauld cheered her contemporaries on, says Jeremiah Jones, a law enforcement officer who balanced work, school, and parenthood while attending Ensign College. “She had more going on than I did,” he says. “I figured if she could do it, I needed to keep with it.”

They felt their senior status from day one. “I walked in with a notebook and pencil,” says Nadauld—implements she proudly used up to her last day. On her younger peers’ desks: laptops and iPads.

Ensign’s small class sizes accelerated friendships. And while her younger classmates brought her up to speed on tech, Nadauld also had much to offer.

“Brandee brought a wealth of life experience,” says Wayne Davis, an adjunct business instructor at Ensign College who had Nadauld in three classes. “The insight of being a parent, of nurturing children, preparing them for college and the workforce, and now to be in that role again herself—that brought a richness of perspective.” Nadauld’s concurrent employment colored classroom discussion. “When she spoke, you could see the rest of the class just turn and watch her and listen,” says Davis. “They paid attention.”

An Ensign College education is rigorous, he adds. “Here you roll up your sleeves, if you will, get under the hood, and mess with the engine,” says Davis. Even introductory-level courses consult for actual clients—students aren’t just looking at case studies. Many students have to repeat a class along the way, says Davis. Not Nadauld. “With Brandee, you could just see this tenacity,” he says.

“My kids saw me cry,” says Nadauld. They also saw her show determination.

When she needed help, she’d send SOS texts to her oldest son, Gavin, then a senior in BYU’s accounting program. Together they’d hit the books late into the night.

Photo by Bradley Slade

“We’d sit at my kitchen table, side by side. I would be doing my homework, and she would be doing hers,” says Gavin, becoming emotional. He was her 34-on-the-ACT kid; she was gritting her teeth through introductory accounting. “Not many people get to see their mom in that light, to see that determination,” he says. “Mostly I remember thinking how cool it was to have a mom who was doing this, even though it was so hard.”

For three and a half years, Nadauld passed her days going straight from work to school to parenting—then to homework until midnight. “Life was hammering her,” says Davis.

But it changed her. “There’s just been a boost to her spirit and her morale,” says John Vaterlaus, the bishop who planted the seed for her enrollment. “She has a renewed outlook on life.”

“Her confidence has skyrocketed,” adds Tyler Morgan, Nadauld’s student-success advisor at Ensign College. And she made history at Ensign, says Morgan: she was part of the first cohort of students to earn four-year bachelor’s degrees at the college.

Nadauld graduated in business administration and management with a job in hand—one that offers new financial freedom. “I had never been to Disneyland,” says Nadauld, who treated her family to a celebratory trip. What’s more, she says: her kids don’t worry about her anymore. “They know Mom’s going to be fine,” she says. “I got this.”

The shark graduation cap still hangs in her house amid other shark paraphernalia—she’s even made a shark quilt and swum with sharks at the Georgia Aquarium.

“It’s been a journey,” she says, “but it’s one I wouldn’t change.”

Scars, she adds, “can be cool.”