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I, the researcher, examine how attending graduate school affects my own strategies of dealing with aging. Inspired by Robert Atchley’s 6-stage process of insight and regurgitation, I chose to enter the regular graduate school system and had pursuing a graduate degree as an example of lifelong learning and a way to interacting with my mother’s generation and energized. With autoethnography as the main research methodology, I conducted fieldwork at nursing homes, assisting living, dementia clinics and community centers, and focused on the intergenerational interaction with my mother. Through close interaction with these informants, the current author has come to realize how elders are positioned in contemporary society, in particular the formation of negatively connoted image such as dependent, useless and worthless. As a baby boomer, I hope that through my lifelong learning experiences I can learn to generate a respectable, independent presence and further down the line may lay out a constructive plan for myself.
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