Penn State forever: Graduate makes most of earning her doctorate later in life

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In many ways, Lori Johnson-Vegas’ time spent as a Penn State student may seem unremarkable. From attending football games in the student section at Beaver Stadium (and her willingness to be tossed in the air after Nittany Lions touchdowns) to playing intramural soccer, she said she enjoys doing many of the things so many other Penn Staters do.

But while Johnson-Vegas had that typical college experience in her late teens and early 20s, she also got to experience much of it again later in life — much later. The 61-year-old will participate in the August commencement ceremony after completing her doctorate in workforce education and development from the Penn State College of Education.

Johnson-Vegas currently resides in Oklahoma but has lived all over the world due to her father and her husband both having served long careers in the military — including her husband’s 30 years in the Air Force that saw him attain the rank of command chief master sergeant, which less than 1% of those in the Air Force ever attain.

Having lived the life of a military child and then a military spouse, it may come as no surprise that Penn State has always felt like home to her. But it’s not for the reasons one might expect, at least not entirely.

“The University wrapped its arms around me,” Johnson-Vegas said of when she first arrived on campus in 1979. “I had people who recognized that I was a military child, whose parents were living in another country, and the administrators and faculty just all treated me like their daughter, always making sure I was okay. By the time I was a junior I was involved in things like cheerleading, student government, was a two-time Penn State Walker Award winner, one of the original Founders of the Lion Ambassadors, Air Force ROTC, and senior year I was inducted into the Parmi Nous Honor Society along with some other things. I just fell in love with Penn State — literally fell in love with all things Penn State.”

Becoming a journalist

Johnson-Vegas has many passions in life, she said, but one of her earliest was journalism. As an elementary school student living in New Jersey while her father was in Vietnam, she discovered the world of newspapers and became enamored with the idea of getting into journalism, which she attributes to her natural curiosity and love for telling others what she has learned. She also possessed a healthy interest in sports.

She cultivated that love throughout her school years, working for student and other newspapers wherever she happened to be living at the time. Throughout high school, her passion followed her as her family moved from place to place with her father’s duty assignments. But when it came to Penn State, it was her passion that led her there.

Johnson-Vegas wanted to be a sports journalist and during her final year as an undergraduate, she said, she received an opportunity that would provide her a wonderful thrill and a great story to tell.

During the 1982 season, she found herself covering the Penn State football team for work on her senior project.

“I did a whole documentary on Penn State football recruiting,” Johnson-Vegas recalled. “And (then-head coach) Joe Paterno was wonderful. He gave me access to everyone that I needed to have access to, so I spent time with the players, spent time with the coaches, spent time with the administration.”

That season would prove to be memorable for more people than her. Penn State defeated Georgia in the Sugar Bowl to cap off the 1982 season and claim the program’s first national title.

Like any good documentarian, Johnson-Vegas was mere feet away as a moment cherished by many Penn Staters was unfolding.

“I was there in New Orleans on the 50-yard line right by (Joe’s wife) Sue Paterno when we won that national championship,” she said. “It was so exciting.”

Overcoming adversity

For any budding sports journalist, witnessing the team they cover win a championship would be a thrilling experience. But Johnson-Vegas soon found that being a Black woman trying to break into a field dominated by white men meant struggling — and often failing — to gain acceptance.

That led her to pivot into the world of human resources, she said.

“It just changed my perspective on that goal,” she said. “I went into human resources and felt I could make a bigger difference in the lives of a lot of people.”

She entered the field but found it challenging to advance as a young Black woman with “only” a bachelor’s degree. Wanting to not only bolster her education, but to make it more difficult for her to be denied promotions prompted her to pursue and obtain a master’s degree from Wilmington University in Delaware.

“I got my master’s degree in human resources and right after I got my master’s degree, I was promoted up,” Johnson-Vegas explained.

Meeting her husband

If it is rare to get a second chance to make a first impression, Johnson-Vegas may be one of the lucky ones.

After graduating from Penn State, she was living with her family at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and met the man she would eventually marry — a young airman named Kevin Vegas.

She first learned about Vegas from her mother, who happened to work in the same area as him, and often brought him up when talking to Johnson-Vegas. One night the two got to talking and Vegas asked her out, prompting her to accept.

But when the time came for that first date, Johnson-Vegas didn’t show up. She had been so enthralled with the basketball game she was attending she had totally forgotten about the date until the friend who accompanied her to the game reminded her.

When she tried to make amends for unintentionally standing him up, it didn’t go well.

“So, I ran to the phone booth and called him and apologized and he hung up on me,” she explained. “Literally, he hung up on me. I said ‘It’s Lori. I’m really sorry. I know we were supposed to…’ and this was, like, an hour and a half past the date time. … I said, ‘Do you still want to meet up?’ He said, ‘No thanks’ and then — click — he hung up on me.”

All was not lost for the couple, however. As the weeks went by the two began talking again.

Eventually, he decided to give it a second chance by asking her out again. This time, the two made it to her office’s St. Patrick’s Day party. They enjoyed themselves and eventually set a date to go bowling so they could have more one-on-one time.

Unbeknownst to him, though, Johnson-Vegas was a skilled bowler, which may have actually helped the couple’s blossoming relationship.

“So, we set up a bowling date and he put some bets down on the games — whoever loses this game has to take the other to dinner, whoever loses this game has to take the other to the movies,” she explained. “Five games later, I beat him all five times. He tells people, ‘I just kept playing and playing because I knew that I would get more dates with her,' not wanting to admit that the reason was that he just could not believe he was losing and wanted to keep trying to beat me. But what I didn’t tell him is that I had been bowling since I was 5 years old.”

The couple continued seeing more and more of each other until, as Johnson-Vegas puts it, he “filled up” her calendar, although that’s the furthest thing from a complaint.

“To this day, even, I get goosebumps thinking about our first date and talking about bowling now,” she said. “He’s a phenomenal husband. He’s a wonderful dad and a great airman. He loves serving our nation.”

Despite growing up all too aware of the sacrifices that are made by those on active duty military service and their families, Johnson-Vegas married then-Airman Vegas. Her life has been challenging for sure, but it has also forged her ability to persevere.

Returning to Penn State

Making the best out of whatever situation in which she has found herself while uplifting others has been a skill developed by a lifetime of never being able to put down roots.

Johnson-Vegas said she remembers having to move from New Hampshire to Portugal just prior to her senior year of high school and how much she was devastated by having to leave the closest place to a permanent home she had ever known. When her husband was reassigned to Germany just before their youngest son’s senior year of high school, the family made a difficult decision to not join him.

With her husband headed to Germany, Johnson-Vegas was presented with an opportunity to return to Central Pennsylvania after being offered a job working for Penn State Outreach overseeing the startup of a new professional development department.

Now that she was a Penn State employee, she saw another opportunity — obtain her doctoral degree from her alma mater.

“While I was there, I was like ‘You know what? I’m here. I’ve got a bachelor’s from here. I love the University. I had already gone back to school and gotten my master’s degree and I am just everything Penn State. So I should just work on my doctorate and take advantage of the fact that I’m here and the time I would normally spend with my husband, he’s not here, so I can dedicate that time to something else,’” Johnson-Vegas explained.

She also took full advantage of once again being a Penn State student. Johnson-Vegas signed up to play intramural soccer, which worried her son — who by that time was a Penn State undergraduate student. He was concerned she’d injure herself playing largely against 18- to 25-year-olds, she said. After watching her play, he quickly became her biggest fan, cheering proudly from the stands.

There was one other student benefit she was more than happy to utilize.

“I could have had (football) tickets in the faculty/staff section, I could have had tickets in the alumni section and I could have had tickets in the student section because I was all three of those things when I was there working on my Ph.D.,” she explained. “And you know what I picked, right?”

She chose the student section, where they stand the entire game, leading to her not only supporting the football team at full throat as part of one of the largest and notoriously loudest student sections in college football, but also to take part in one of its many traditions — being tossed into the air once for every point Penn State has scored so far in the game after a Nittany Lions touchdown.

Johnson-Vegas said it was something part of her brain badly wanted to do while the remainder fixated on her fear of heights and lack of confidence that the strangers she entrusted to lift her would return her safely to the ground. Ultimately, she decided to go through with it, much to the delight of those seated around her, a group of students that included her eldest son.

“I was in the S Zone when they did that,” she recalled, referencing the block letter ‘S’ formed in a portion of the student section. “And I didn’t know this, but apparently, I screamed the entire time they were throwing me up and so when they finished and they put me down and as I was trying to gather myself, when I turned around the whole S Zone erupted and just started running over to me and high-fiving me. I was still in shock from the whole experience, but they were all excited. I’m thinking I might have been the first mom in Penn State history to do that!”

As thrilling as that experience was for her, she said, she remembers not being such a fan of it when her oldest son first came to Penn State.

“The first time I saw students doing that while watching a Penn State game on TV, I called him and I said ‘Let me tell you something, if I ever see you doing that, I’m pulling you out of school. That is the most dangerous thing in the world,” Johnson-Vegas said. “‘I’m not kidding, I will pull you out of school if I ever find out that you did anything like that while you were there because that’s horrible!’ And then, here I am up there working on my Ph.D. getting thrown in the air!”

Setting an example

Johnson-Vegas had begun working on a doctorate in workforce education and development because she felt it would allow her to not only continue to work in human resources in corporate America, but to teach in that field as well. As a graduate student, she was awarded the Penn State Achieving Woman award by the Penn State Commission for Women.

But as she was in the midst of pursuing her degree, her husband called from Germany to explain he received a new assignment — this time to Japan, prompting Johnson-Vegas to have to make another difficult decision.

“I was like, ‘I do not want to miss out on this opportunity. I do not want to be apart from him anymore,’” she said. “So, I left and joined him in Japan. I had done enough of my residency to be able to really, just basically be able to work on my dissertation. But in that time, he got orders again and every time you have to pick up and move, it just takes a lot out of you. It’s a lot of disruption and I remember thinking ‘I’m never going to be able to finish this degree because we keep moving.’”

Johnson-Vegas estimates her family had to move in and out of four different homes after leaving Penn State, a process that left little time for anything else. As a result, her Ph.D. pursuit was put on hold.

After her husband’s retirement from the Air Force, she finally decided she wanted to buckle down and finish her doctorate. But another surprise obstacle loomed as her husband suffered a heart attack.

“A lot of my time and effort went into making sure he was OK,” Johnson-Vegas said. “So, I was like, ‘I’m just never going to get this done,' and I was at peace because I knew he was my priority.’”

Her husband eventually recovered. With him no longer in the Air Force and her sons both grown and no longer living at home, the path was finally clear for Johnson-Vegas to complete her doctorate, although it wasn’t without others wondering why she felt compelled to finish at an age when most are contemplating retirement.

“I’m 61 years old and I have friends asking me why — they would be taking cruises and they would go ‘Oh, we’re going on vacation to such-and-such, why don’t you all join us?’ or, ‘We’re going out for a weekend here, you all should come with us,’” she explained. “I’m like ‘I can’t, I’m trying to get this dissertation done.’ So, I got it from all sides.”

Her motivation stemmed less from career prospects and more from fulfilling a promise to herself and providing an example of perseverance, she said, something Johnson-Vegas has forged through during a life of constant changes and unexpected challenges.

As she puts it, she was “nervageous,” a word she created meaning “having the nerve to make a decision and being courageous enough to act on that decision.”

“Nervageous is taking on that ‘thing’ in your life — i.e. a goal, a bully, a dream, an obstacle,” Johnson-Vegas explained. “Nervageous is about putting fear in your corner and using your nerves to propel you. Nervageous is having confidence in your ability to stand up and take charge; to dare that ‘thing’ or ‘person’ to get in your way; to accomplish that ‘thing’ you have been putting off; to take the necessary steps to turn that rock into a stepping stone.”

Now that she has completed her work and will return to campus in August to participate in the commencement ceremony, she said she's proud that she did not give up when so many others would have and felt justified in doing so.

“I don’t like to give up and I like to be an example,” Johnson-Vegas explained. “I like to be an inspiration and I really want to show our military spouses that they, too, can do this. Being a spouse does not have to be an obstacle for what you’re trying to do and for the goals that you have for your career and for your education.

“I also want to be that inspiration for people who are older who’ve always wanted to do it but heard ‘What’s the point? You’re older. Why put in that time and effort?’ So, it’s not just the inspiration, but for me, it was something that I wanted to do because I believe in it, and I also just believe in continuing education. I don’t think that any of us can have too much education.”