Alumni | Business and Industry | Lion VoicesDecember 18, 2024

Accounting for Her Success

Written By: Ian Silvester

Before Lorin Nhongvongsithi walked across the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith stage in December 2021, she had doubts the moment would ever come.

“Twelve-year-old Lorin always thought she’d have a degree … but 30-year-old Lorin didn’t,” Nhongvongsithi shared.

With encouragement from her best friend, Nhongvongsithi returned to UAFS in her mid-30s to finish the education she had stepped away from 15 years prior.

The pieces, she said, “all fell into place.”

“I thought I’d be really out of place in school in my 30s, and I had been out of college for almost 20 years.” Despite running a lucrative business that took a significant amount of her attention, and raising two teenage sons, she was mistaken again. “I never felt out of place,” she said. “I never felt like I was a 35-year-old in a sea of 18-year-olds.”

She found a support system and a network of encouragers in the Non-Traditional Student Organization and Beta Gamma Sigma – a business student organization. And to be sure she could really do it all, she tailored her class schedule to full days Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Four years later, she graduated with honors as she accepted her bachelor’s degree in business administration. A year after graduation, Nhongvongsithi accepted an administrative assistant position with the Carolyn McKelvey Moore School of Nursing, but with her decades of experience as a store manager at Chick-fil-A, she knew she had more to offer.

“I’m a numbers lady,” she said with a laugh. “I wasn’t using all of my tools.”

She soon applied for a position as a staff accountant in the cashier’s office, merging her passions for UAFS and for numbers, and in January, she will celebrate two years as a UAFS employee.

As Nhongvongsithi reflected on achieving her dream of earning a college degree and her new career helping students seek their own education, she said she wouldn’t change a thing.

“It’s done a lot for my self-confidence. As a young mother who left school and started working, but to be able to come back to school 15 years later proved to myself and my kids that anything is possible,” she said.

Nhongvongsithi’s two sons, both Eagle Scouts, have followed the path she set. Her oldest is a sophomore studio art student at UAFS. Her youngest is a concurrent student in the Western Arkansas Technical Center program. He will attend UAFS in the fall, with plans on studying studio art, and will arrive with an associate degree.

“I’m very proud of the young men that they are,” she said through tears. “I don’t think they know how proud I am of them.”

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