76-year-old student graduates from doctoral program more than 50 years after admission

A 76-year-old student at the University of Bristol has finally completed his PhD, more than 50 years after entering.

In 1970, Dr. Nick Exten received the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship for his doctoral dissertation in mathematical sociology from the University of Pittsburgh at Pennsylvania.

But five years later, he had to leave the university and return to the UK, never having received a diploma.

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On Valentine’s Day 2023, Exten received his PhD from the University of Bristol in front of his wife Claire and their 11-year-old granddaughter Freya. He came to the University of Bristol in 2016 to complete his Master of Philosophy degree. He then studied for a PhD in philosophy, graduating in 2022 at the age of 75.

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“What I was trying to do in the early 70s was extremely difficult,” Axten said in a press release. “Some problems are so big that it takes the best part of life to deal with them. They require long and intense thought. This problem has taken me 50 years.”

Aksten said he would continue the research he had begun in America. It includes a new theory of understanding human behavior based on the values ​​that each person holds. Axten said he hopes to break new ground in the field of behavioral psychology.

To give you an idea of ​​how much time has passed, when Axten started his undergraduate program in 1967, the men wore their hair long and the women wore miniskirts. In addition, smoking was allowed in university buildings, and the idea of ​​a personal computer was still far-fetched.

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“It was still the power of flowers, and there was a revolutionary feeling to it. It was the time of the Vietnam War, Paris, Prague and student sit-ins. Jack Straw was the president of the students’ union in Leeds,” he continued. “Sociology and psychology suddenly became the subject of a boom. I went to study them because I wanted to understand people.”

“I enjoyed being a student at the University of Bristol again,” he added. “All the other graduate students in philosophy were about 23 years old, but they accepted me as their own. They are smart people, full of ideas, and I enjoyed talking to them, especially during the day in the pub.”

Axten lives in Wells, Somerset with his wife.

This story was reported from Los Angeles.

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