Most of us have all heard the old adage, it is never too late to learn, and Ren?e Heyliger has done just that.

Ms Heyliger, who is no stranger to study, decided to complete an online master?s degree in international business administration, a subject which is completely unrelated to her current career as a physical education teacher at Somerset Primary School.

But in spite of her new-found success with her MBA from Schiller International University, she has no intention of changing careers as yet.

?I love my job too much,? she said, ?And one of the reasons that I am staying put now is because of my five-year-old-son.

?I owe it to him to spend as much time as possible with him while he is young and give him what I have given other children for the last years. He has just started school and I want to hang around with him and spend some time with him after school.?

Ms Heyliger said she was looking at doing a master?s degree because it is a useful tool in as far as upward mobility is concerned.

?A friend, Kevin Anderson, encouraged me to do this degree and to be study partners,? she said. ?He came across the ad in the paper, so we did it together. He had more prerequisites than I had and he finished it before I did.?

Although she teaches physical education and health to Primary Two to Primary Six students, her undergraduate degree was in economics.

?But I did the degree in art, I didn?t do it in business,? said the single mother. ?Physical education was always my interest, but after I finished my initial degree, I decided to do an education degree, with a concentration in physical education.?

She was able to accomplish so much with her education through the help of a mutual situation.

?My niece and I worked out a system where I had her daughter, who is a similar age to my son and she would also have my son,? she said. ?She was able to work an extra job and I was able to study.

?I rarely went to the (Bermuda) College, because most of my work was online and I was able to do most of it at home. I did do two courses in Florida, as they offered express courses in January, which were a week long.

?It was a full credit in a week and I did that twice. They also offer that in the summer, as a two week course, and the courses are all around the world. I knew some guys who did their courses in Switzerland.?

Ms Heyliger said it was great that the online courses are available for anyone who wants to achieve.

?I recommend it to older people and I was inspired by one of my professors who had did a similar course herself, with three kids in a year,? said Ms Heyliger.

?And she was also working and I felt that if she could do it, I could do it. One of the nice parts about this university, I?m not sure about others, but it was a personal relationship with the professors and the classes were small.

?In fact, in one of our first classes there were only four people from all over the world. This is the great thing about Schiller itself, in that it is international.?

Ms Heyliger said the professors set the curriculum for the term and also how and when they want you to work.

?Some set an entire set of chapters and you work at your own pace,? she said, ?Others would only put up a lesson a week. So, say you have to work on two chapters and a particular assignment each week.

?The IT (information technology) professor did completely different types of projects. There were projects in most of them and the research was done either online or wherever you could.?

Becoming a student again was sometimes nerve wreaking, she said.

?But because I had company, it wasn?t so bad and we worked together and encouraged each other,? said Ms Heyliger. ?In fact he worked at night and he set aside one night a week were we actually got together, otherwise we were on the phone to each other.

?The scholarship pays for all the online courses, as well as the courses we did in Florida,? she said. ?But we had to pay our own way there and for accommodations, which in the first year we were offered on-campus accommodations in a dorm and the second year we opted not to do that.

?It ended up not costing me much at all and it was a huge burden off of me because these courses ran between $800 and $1,000 each. They can be very expensive if you don?t have any help.?

She ended by saying that she encouraged people to simply make up their mind and just do it.