During her time as a student, Lindsay “Coco” Hames has seen fax turn into email, Tim Tebows’ career come and go and her band’s song feature in the movie “Whip It.”
At 35 years old, Hames is graduating this semester with her bachelor’s degree in English, which took about half of her life to complete. She started at UF in Summer 2000 as an English major, but she struggled to keep up with the course load as her music career started to take off.
“You get to that point where you can’t believe you’re about to be done with this,” Hames said. “I’m proud of myself.”
The self-taught singer, guitarist and songwriter started her UF career by scheduling her time between on tour and on campus. But eventually, she left UF at the end of 2002 to tour full time.
“I knew that school would always be there,” she said, “but this opportunity and this time and your youth — those would not always be there.”
Hames promised her father, a UF Law School alumnus, she would finish her degree. She moved to New York City and then to Los Angeles in 2003, where the desire to finish her degree started nagging her.
While she bounced between cities, Hames started working with the university’s Department of Continuing Education, now known as Flexible Learning, she said. The program offers year-round online, self-paced courses for students.
While working full-time, Hames made some attempts at studying at UF as a traditional residential student. She tried once in Spring 2008 after returning from Europe and again soon after.
During her second attempt, Hames was exchanging emails with the dean of her college when he said, “You either need to focus on school and be here and do it, or you need to wait until technology catches up to what you can do because this is not working,” Hames recalled.
“It was sobering,” Hames said. “On paper, it was showing what a convoluted, cobbled-together approach I had been undertaking, and in person, you could see how frustrated I was trying to make everything work at once.”
Hames left UF again and continued to work on her musical career, performing with her bands The Ettes and later The Parting Gift. She created music for shows such as “Friday Night Lights” and “Weeds.”
While touring in Europe in 2017, she learned her father was sick and had to have heart surgery. She flew back to America to be with her father when she remembered the promise she made to him. He asked her when she would graduate.
“I made a joke, saying, ‘I could never finish because you got sick. You know, I promised you that one day I’d finish, and if I don’t do it, then you’ll never die,’” Hames said.
In Fall 2017, Hames went back to school. She and Ryan Braun, an advisor at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, came up with a plan so she could graduate in two semesters by taking online classes while she was in Memphis, Tennessee.
Records at UF don’t show if Hames holds the record for the longest time taken to complete a bachelor’s degree. Braun said, however, many students take long gaps before returning to their education.
“There are still barriers to higher education, but geography is becoming less and less one of them,” Braun said.
In less than two weeks, Hames will finally graduate from UF, following the footsteps of both her parents and her older sister.
“It’s OK that it took 18 years because I didn’t miss anything,” she said. “I got to do all of it.”
Lindsay “Coco” Hames
