Gap years are common. How about 51 of them?

After graduating from high school in 1967, Lynn Trott ’25 attended one year of college at the University of California-San Diego. Lyndon Johnson was president. The Vietnam War was raging. Apollo 8 was readying for its mission to circumnavigate the moon.

Despite a 4.0 GPA, Trott left USCD after the spring semester in 1968. “I had no clue what I wanted to do and found myself asking, ‘Why am I in college?’” 

Fifty-seven years later, after a long career in the arts, Trott, 75, will graduate with honors from William & Mary on May 16 with a Bachelor of Arts in art and art history. She will join her husband, Barry Trott ’83 and her daughter, Eleanor Trott ’14, as W&M alumni. 

This part of her academic journey took six years as a part-time student. In 2019, after auditing classes for a few years in William & Mary’s art department, Trott decided to “go for it.” 

“I had always thought that I might go back for a degree someday, and the classes I took as a senior citizen (at W&M) had been very rewarding, so it seemed the right time to apply,” said Trott, who lives in Toano. “I was accepted as a transfer student, 50 years after my year at UCSD, and William & Mary accepted all my credits, which was a big help.”

Life experience

Trott may be just now getting her college degree, but she has spent a lifetime learning. After that first year of college, she moved to Austria, where her mother had been hired as a pianist at an opera house. Trott, who had been singing and playing instruments since an early age, thought about an opera career herself. 

“I auditioned but the instructor didn’t think my voice was suited to opera,” she recalled. “Thank goodness because I probably would have ruined my voice trying.” 

After more than a decade in Europe, where she and her mother supported themselves in part by making musical instruments from kits, Trott apprenticed herself to an instrument maker in the U.S., who soon fell on hard times financially. Trott wound up in Virginia, studying wood carving and working as an administrator for a harp society. For a time, she lived in Richmond, working as a mechanic in a factory that repaired spool-winding machines.

It was during that period that she landed a fateful audition at Colonial Williamsburg, where she was hired as a balladeer to sing 17th and 18th-century music in the taverns. She has been there for 40 years. That is where she met her husband, Barry, also a balladeer.

Their only child, Eleanor Trott ’14, earned her degree from William & Mary, as a double major in art and art history and geology. “We have had some of the same professors,” said Eleanor Trott, who now works in conservation in western Virginia. “I’m hugely proud of her going back to school and pursuing her goals. I want the world to know about her.”

Back to school

The return to academia was prompted initially by Colonial Williamsburg’s decision to end the balladeer program in 2017. It was reinstated 18 months later, but in the interim Trott turned her emphasis to ceramics. She had been working in clay since 2002 and audited some classes with Mike Jabbur, associate professor of art. He told her if she wanted to pursue a degree, he would sign on as her advisor.  

“I don’t usually have open seats in my studio classes and when I do, they are usually taken by recent graduates, not somebody who had already come as far as Lynn had in her career,” Jabbur said, but Trott had impressed him with very “thought-out” pieces.

“Sometimes when students audit, it’s at a very surface level, but she always went above and beyond. She did two to three times the amount of work required,” Jabbur said. “She really dug into the curriculum.”

Trott’s senior honors thesis, a 3D installation that combines sculptural pieces in clay, metal and wood, reflects both a lifetime of artistic endeavor and her love of nature.

The tree branches are wooden curlicues, a skill she mastered making musical instruments. The toadstools and mushrooms on the forest floor are ceramics. She added shine with bronze pieces. (“I’ve fallen in love with welding,” she said.) She climbed an 8-foot ladder to hang long gauzy strips from the ceiling of Andrews Gallery, an effect that added an ethereal element to her imaginary forest. 

“Nature is my inspiration. When I first started making pottery everything I made was a vase to hold flowers,” she said.

 She hopes “to encourage people to think about what the forest and forest conservation means to them, what it means to walk in the woods, the small elements and the new things you notice as you walk.”

Trott is not the oldest person to earn an undergraduate degree from William & Mary. Elsie C. Woodward ’21, P ’91, P ’96, was 75 and four months when she earned a Bachelor of Arts in kinesiology & health sciences.

Trott will be 75 and two months when she receives her diploma on May 16.

There are about a dozen older adults taking classes at William & Mary this semester, but the registrar’s office believes Trott is the only one seeking a degree. Most are enrolled in language courses. 

Trott will graduate with honors although she says she did face challenges. “I thought it would be harder to write papers, as I thought I wouldn’t be good at research and writing. It turns out my writing professor said I had a knack for it,” she said. “But I am very slow, so I need to start earlier than most when a paper is due.”

The most difficult part was learning to work on group projects. “I’m so used to making things alone. I found out it is good to complement my weaknesses with the strengths of others,” she said. “The biggest change in me is my increased self-confidence.”     

What’s next for Trott? Maybe more teaching. She has worked as a ceramics instructor in local art galleries. She loves the classroom. “I have often been mistaken for faculty, sometimes even when the actual professor is in the room.,” she said. “I got used to saying, ‘I’m just a student, too.’”

Or maybe there’s still more education on the horizon. “I have so many mixed emotions right now,” Trott said. “It seems so strange to finally be here after dreaming of it for so long. In some ways, I will miss being an undergrad. At least I can go back to taking classes as a senior citizen, so I don’t have to be done being a student at William & Mary.”