Almost 50 years after his first day of school, Guelph man graduates university

It’s an accomplishment 49 years in the making, with one Guelph man graduating from the University of Guelph this year after first attending classes in 1976.

“It’s taken me a while to get my head around that I’m finally done…It didn’t really hit me until the convocation ceremony when the pipe band started to play in and I began to realize, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve accomplished something fairly significant here,'” Dave Burnett told CityNews in an interview.

He enrolled in the agriculture program out of high school but only lasted about a year and a half before dropping out due to a lack of interest. What followed was what Burnett refers to as his 20-year “rabbit hole of addiction,” where he battled with an alcohol addiction.

Life wound up taking him on a ride, dealing with not only addiction and recovery but also marriage and starting his own accounting business. Throughout it all, the thought of graduation remained on his mind, becoming a bucket list item he was hoping to accomplish.

“Several years ago I had a mentor helping me get my life back in order, and I said something about going back to school, and he said ‘Think of what it will do for your self-confidence’… and I didn’t understand then what he was saying, but I understand now,” Burnett said.

He would attend morning classes before going to an AA meeting, then head back to class in the afternoon before spending his evenings in the library. He took classes one at a time, handling things assignment by assignment.

“I joke that I started with blackboards and chalk and ended with everything online,” he laughed.

When he turned 65, he was eligible for a tuition waiver, allowing him to re-register for courses in applied animal science.

Burnett jokes that while sitting in class with fellow students, even the jeans he was wearing were older than his classmates.

According to his professors, Burnett was respected by the whole class, able to bring humour and energy, as well as lessons he learned from his real-world experience as a farm accountant over the years.

“He must be one of the only undergraduate students to deliver a guest lecture for a class that he was enrolled in” said Dr. Joshua Nasielski, an Ontario Agricultural College professor in the Department of Plant Agriculture.

He graduated in the class of 2025, just shy of 50 years from his first day of university, after earning himself a 90 per cent on his last project.

If there were more time, he would work on getting a postgraduate degree, but he joked that there’s not enough years in the timeline.

Instead, he’ll be adjusting to finally being done with school, and attending a graduation party for his granddaughter who just graduated from Queen’s University, but notably only after her grandfather graduated from Guelph.

“It was a bucket list thing for me, it became a sort of a challenge, and one of those loose ends in life that you wanted to round off,” Burnett said.