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“I said to myself, ‘Hey, somebody should be studying that,’” Visnick said. “To be brutally honest with you, I couldn’t find anybody to do it, so I said, ‘I’ll go back to school and I’ll do that research myself.’”
When Lorinda Visnick turned 60 in May, her siblings threw her a birthday party. Just a few days later, she woke up early and took the commuter rail from her Beverly home to the Massachusetts State House for the first day of her internship.
Interning at the State House in her sixties was not originally part of the plan — Visnick admitted she wasn’t sure she’d even live that long.
Both of her parents had died at 59. Among her siblings, turning 60 had become an occasion worthy of celebration, because in their world, it wasn’t guaranteed.
“I thought, there’s no way in hell that I’m ever getting anything more than my bachelor’s degree, because even that at the time, felt very overwhelming,” Visnick, a first generation college graduate, said.
The mother of four is currently pursuing a PhD in public policy at UMass Boston, partly inspired by her work for the Beverly School Committee. She has served on the committee for 12 years and is now up for reelection.
Visnick’s time on the committee inspired her passion for policy after she worked with a group that builds affordable housing.
“I said to myself, ‘Hey, somebody should be studying that,’” she said. “To be brutally honest with you, I couldn’t find anybody to do it, so I said, ‘Hey, I’ll go back to school and I’ll do that research myself.’”
‘This is the internship for me’
After the first year of her PhD program at UMass Boston, Visnick thought she’d take the summer off, but an internship posting caught her attention.
“It was like the perfect intersection of, how does our state decide what policies they’re going to put in place and what laws they’re going to pass,” she said.
The internship sent Visnick to work for Sen. Jason Lewis, who represents parts of Middlesex County including Malden and Melrose.
“To see the sausage being made at the state level, where I already know how it’s made at the local level, I’m studying it and thinking, maybe someday I want to try to change it at the federal level. It was like, this is the internship for me,” she said.
Visnick spent a hefty amount of her internship focused on legislation to make schools phone-free. She researched other states that proposed cell phone banning bills and explored why they passed or did not pass.
She said witnessing the Senate in session was like “watching theater.”
“To see the actual work that’s happening that the average person knows nothing about, was really, really cool and eye opening,” Visnick said. “Because I too sometimes feel like, wow, why did this take so long?
Visnick remarked that many daunting parts of an internship that may frighten early college students didn’t scare her, since she had experienced them before in other ways.
“If you were 20 and you didn’t have a job yet, you haven’t jumped those hurdles already, maybe it feels like a big scary thing. Not many problems felt scary to me because I’m old,” Visnick said.
“The hardest thing was walking from North Station up the hill to the State House on really hot summer days,” she laughed.
Visnick and 3 of her children graduated within 2 weeks of each other
Visnick and her adult son, who was pursuing a master’s degree, bonded over using the same textbook and feeling the daunting “Sunday scaries” each week at their dinner table.
When Visnick started her master’s degree at Endicott College in 2020, her daughter had just graduated from the same college.
“We got razzed a little bit about that, but it was also this really cool thing that we can talk about, ‘Have you read chapter six yet?’ over family dinner,” Visnick said.
In 2023, Visnick earned her master’s degree during the same two-week span as three of her children’s graduations: her youngest son from high school, her older son from college, and her daughter from a master’s program.
Though she said her children appreciate their shared experiences with their mother, Visnick said she wished they had seen her pursue higher education earlier.
“That might have given them a more sense of assuredness, that you don’t always have the answers,” she said. “You maybe don’t even know what you’re going to do the next day, but you approach things with an open mind and curiosity, and look, I’m doing that now.”
Being a life-long learner
A star basketball player while in undergrad at Boston University, Visnick received a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1987, and thought she’d never leave the tech world.
“I don’t think I would have ever walked away from a really good, paying tech job that I loved to go to this other thing, but things happen for a reason, and so I did,” she said.
But, after her company downsized and her position was cut, she received a master’s degree in organizational behavior and learning from Endicott College.
In a conversation with the college’s dean, Visnick was told that her next, inevitable step was pursuing a PhD.
“I laughed at her, because I was like, what, like, maybe like, 50 or 55 at the time, and I’m like, I’ll be dead by then,” Visnick said. “But then as I finished up my masters, I was like, she’s right.”
She recalled a memorable lecture from a psychology professor who expressed her passion for marine biology. The BU professor talked about the idea of a “pivot point” — the halfway mark in one’s working life — and how she planned to retire from teaching to pursue marine biology.
Visnick, set to start the second year of her PhD program, said she finds herself reflecting on that lecture frequently — realizing she’s doing exactly what the professor described.
“In the world of education, especially as a school committee member, we always talk about how we want people to have a growth mindset and fail forward. We want them to be curious,” she said.
‘There is no substitution for those life experiences’
Visnick urges adults interested in a mid-life career change to simply do it.
“So many people are averse to change, they’re unsure of the unknown” she said.
Visnick said trying something new at an older age is worth it, because people can lean on their previous experiences.
“But if you were to try something new, you would not start right at the bottom of an intelligence curve,” she said. “You’d be able to jump from the middle of one curve to the middle of another curve.”
Visnick said she thought her younger self would be in disbelief of all she’s accomplished today.
“You might not have the specific knowledge about whatever is your new field, but you have all this other knowledge that you can bring to bear and life experiences,” she said. “And there is no substitution for those life experiences.”
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