Mom, daughter graduating together at UNLV

There was this moment a couple of years ago when Kristina Marcus wanted to give up.

Not entirely, mind you. Just on the whole a-college-degree-will-help-you-get-a-good-job nonsense, as she saw it. But then she talked to her mom.

What's the point of all that college you've already finished? asked her mother, Sharon Nicholas.

"What were you doing?" she said.

Marcus stopped to think about it. She considered the words of her mom, who had been raising her alone for more than a decade.

She also couldn't help but think about how her mother was halfway to her own college degree.

"It made me more motivated to finish," Marcus said. "I couldn't let her pass me."

They will both graduate today from UNLV, Marcus with a communications degree and Nicholas with a nursing degree.

They'll be two of more than 2,500 graduates, most of whom will be making their way from college into the grown-up real world.

Nicholas, 50, has already been there a long time.

She divorced about 16 years ago, when her daughter was 12. It would be just the two of them from then on.

Nicholas went to work as a cocktail waitress. She worked the graveyard shift. Which meant her teenage daughter would be home alone from midnight to 8 a.m.

Nicholas worried, of course. So she came up with a trick: She would place a single hair atop her daughter's bedroom door, then check if it was still there in the morning to be sure nobody entered or left the room. It was always there.

"Really?" Marcus said when her mom was telling this story. "What age was this?"

Marcus, 28, studied video production at Vo-Tech High School, but wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life. She drifted through college for a while, slowly.

She studied real estate. She went to an art school. She didn't finish either. She moved to California but eventually came back here.

A few years ago, her mom met a guy, John Nicholas, and they married. Which provided Nicholas an opportunity to rethink her life.

"I didn't want to do cocktails forever," she said.

So, she went to school. She thought she wanted to become a nutritionist. But while studying at the College of Southern Nevada, she caught the nursing bug.

She graduated, then went to UNLV. She had no idea what she was in for.

"It was the most challenging endeavor I've ever accomplished," she said of making it through the grueling nursing program.

Tish Smyer, the nursing school's associate dean for academic affairs, said that's a pretty common reaction.

She said the program takes physical, emotional and academic prowess.

Despite its difficulty, 53 newly educated nurses will be among today's graduates.

Marcus will be there for her own degree, of course. But she'll also applaud her mom.

She recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she was an intern for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

She said she hopes to get into political communications after graduating. Her mom said she's a gifted writer.

Nicholas will have to pass the state nursing exam. Once she's licensed, she wants to work, maybe in a doctor's office.

But first, the ceremony.

Nicholas went to pick up their graduation gowns the other day. The staff wondered why she was getting two of them. One, she told them, is mine. The other is for my daughter.

"How many people can say that?" she said.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.