This Grad Times Her Labor to Commencement

Stephanie Redden is no typical 24-year-old planning to work for several years before starting a family.

She’s way ahead of the curve on that one.  While enrolled in UC’s highly demanding graphic design program – ranked as one of the best design programs in the country with a curriculum designed to weed students out – she had a daughter, married and is now about to have her second child.

“I actually timed this pregnancy to coincide with graduation.  We wanted two children, and I thought to have my family first.  Now, in a couple of months, I’ll start working full-time in the graphic design field,” explained Stephanie.

This wasn’t Stephanie’s original plan when she first came to UC from DePere, Wisconsin, (near Green Bay) six years ago.  Then, she’d thought to follow the traditional path:  school first, family later.

But as a 19-year-old sophomore, she met her future husband, Sean, a UC history major, and the rest, as they say, is now history.  Their daughter, one-and-a-half-year-old Conner was born in October 2001, and despite her new role as mother, Stephanie hardly missed a beat in the graphic design program, part of UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.  She kept pace with projects, classes and her cooperative education work quarters in which academic classes alternate with paid, professional experience from quarter to quarter.  She’s only missed one co-op quarter in the fall of 2001 but has still  completed enough co-ops to graduate.

Stephanie, of Deer Park, shrugs off most of the challenges of pregnancy, motherhood, working and academics.  “I was lucky.  The pregnancies weren’t the biggest deals.  I had it easy,” she claims.  “I’ve had no morning sickness.  I just eat all the time, and I get tired.  Sean’s 84-year-old grandmother and great-aunts have cared for Conner when both Sean and I are working, or if he’s working, and I’m in school.  Really, we could never have done it without his grandmother,” she says.

And her fellow students have watched out for her too.  “If I’m in the computer lab at midnight, they’ll ask me, ‘What are you doing here?’  They carry things for me, make sure I have a seat, little things.  They even helped me to line dance a while back.  And sometimes, I bring Conner with me to school if I just have an individual or small-group meeting.  She’s happy to run around, pick up our tools, and my classmates are good about it,” adds Stephanie.

In fact, all in all, she thinks that family and motherhood have helped her grades because she took her studies much more seriously.  “Suddenly, I had a lot more responsibility.  Generally, I had to cut out social events.  I had to focus a lot more the last two years.  The forced maturity actually helped my grades despite that fact that I’d sometimes be doing homework while Conner destroyed everything in the house,” says Stephanie who will graduate with a strong 3.5 grade point average.

She also credits her family with insisting that she finish school.  Before Conner was born, her parents were very happy to have a new grandchild on the way, however, Stephanie recalls, “My mother was firm.  She told me, ‘You will finish school.’” 

And just as they encouraged Stephanie and helped her financially to finish college, Stephanie’s parents – Taryn and Steven Sticht – will be celebrating with her too.  Stephanie’s parents are coming to Cincinnati to celebrate both Stephanie’s graduation on June 13 along with the June 2 (by caesarian) arrival of Stephanie’s new baby, a boy the family will name Graham.