As the University counts down to Commencement, UConn Today is featuring some of this year’s outstanding graduating students, nominated by their academic school or college or another University program in which they participated. For additional profiles of students in the Class of 2012, click here.

As the U.S. grieved for its slain civil rights leaders and fallen rock heroes and the turbulent 1960s tumbled toward the uncertain 1970s, Sheryl Kennedy wanted nothing more than to collect her Torrington High diploma and flee the constraints of formal education to discover the world.

In the decades that followed, what she discovered included the joys of traveling, launching and changing careers, marriage, and motherhood – and eventually, a seat right back in a classroom in her hometown.

That’s where Kennedy enrolled in a freshman English class at UConn’s Torrington campus in 2006, an experience that set her on such a life-changing course of intellectual discovery that she still chokes up when discussing it.

Now, the 61-year-old Salisbury resident, mother, and grandmother is set to join thousands of other students in collecting their UConn diplomas. Kennedy will receive a bachelor’s degree in English, capping an academic career during which she’s been a two-time Babbidge Scholar and a widely recognizable face at the Torrington campus.

Kennedy, a massage therapist and former caterer, says she felt stifled by formal education as the world shifted outside her high school classroom windows in the late 1960s. She started college at Western Connecticut State but quit before the end of her first semester, selling her prized record albums for $1 each and setting out on a bus to Boston, where she started cooking at a shelter.

“I thought, ‘I can educate myself. I can read on my own.’ I needed to get out and see what I considered to be the real world, and for a long time, I just thought college wasn’t relevant to my life,” she says.

Though she always loved literature, Kennedy says, reading was one pastime among many in an increasingly busy life that grew to include marriage, motherhood, her career, traveling, and other ventures. But, she says, “There was always something missing.”

That “something” came to Kennedy in a roundabout way: She saw a flyer at her local post office in 2006 for a writers’ retreat on Block Island and signed up with a friend. That’s where she met Davyne Verstandig, the first of many UConn Torrington educators she credits with literally helping change her life.

Sensing from Kennedy’s questions that she had an innate thirst to learn, Verstandig suggested she take a class at UConn’s Torrington campus, where Verstandig is a lecturer in English and creative writing and directs the Litchfield County Writers Project.

Kennedy’s first class was with adjunct professor Geraldine “Gerry” Van Doren, who introduced students to the concept of literature as the “Great Conversation” that links generations, cultures, and societies. That concept struck Kennedy with the force of a lightning bolt when they were asked to view a mid-1500s painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” read a 1938 poem about it by W.H. Auden, and write their own thoughts as modern-day participants in that “conversation.”

“When you read critically with brilliant professors, which is what I’ve had here, it’s a full body, full mind, full soul and spirit experience,” Kennedy says. “There’s hardly any room in your brain or your heart for anything else.

“It was one extraordinary class after another, and I realized I had to go all the way with this and get a degree in English,” she says. “There wasn’t anything that wasn’t exciting.”

Kennedy started with one or two classes at a time, but in her excitement to learn more, she soon signed up as a full-time student. She also became an ardent ambassador for the Torrington campus, where she’s become a friend and cheerleader to students of all ages.

“There’s a sense of grace about her and a sense of enthusiasm, passion and, at the same time, a sense of calm purpose that permeates the classes she’s in,” says Verstandig, who has watched Kennedy’s evolution since their chance meeting on Block Island several years ago.

And as much as Kennedy’s mentors and friends at the Torrington campus are proud of her accomplishments, she has another ardent fan: her 85-year-old mother, who can’t stop bragging about her daughter’s progress to her home health aides, though Kennedy is a bit bashful about the attention.

“Sheryl just came alive right from the start,” Verstandig says. “We find teachers in many places, not always in traditional classrooms, and somehow I think she will continue to find ways to be a teacher and share her knowledge.”