MBA graduate had courage to take a chance

Posted: 01/25/2012

Nicole Ryan, who received her master’s degree in business administration from Roosevelt University in December, comes from a family that has always had the courage to take a chance and make a difference.

A single mother who has held various management-level positions since 1998 at Hoffman-Estates-based Sears Holding Company, the Schaumburg woman took a chance in 2008 when she decided to return to school 18 years after getting a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the time, an upper-level manager at Sears had taken notice of her accomplishments, offering to become her mentor.

“School was not easy for me so the thought of going back was daunting,” said Ryan, who was inducted into the Heller College of Business chapter of Delta Mu Delta Honor Society before her graduation. “I knew that the only way I could better my life and that of my 18-year-old daughter was to take a chance and go back to school,” she said.

Ryan’s parents, Richard and Julie Scoma, also showed courage nearly 40 years ago when they took a chance on making a difference for the better in the lives of their children. In fact, the Scomas made national news in 1974 when they decided to take their children, including Nicole, then a kindergartner, out of a Chicago public school so they could be taught at home.

“It was mainly my husband’s (Richard Scoma’s) idea to do this,” said Julie Scoma, who remembers being threatened with arrest if she didn’t return Nicole, and her older sister, Lizabeth, who was then in first grade, back to their Ravenswood elementary school.

The decision to home-school became the basis of a revolutionary Illinois legal case, Scoma vs. the Chicago Board of Education, which has helped shape today’s burgeoning home-school movement.

““I don’t want to say that we were the only ones doing home-schooling, but our case (which upheld an earlier law for the right to home-school in Illinois) helped initiate a nationwide movement. It started the ball rolling on the right to home-school a child on philosophical grounds,” Scoma said.

Ryan can remember being home-schooled as national media figures watched. She recalls sitting in the lap of journalist Carole Simpson, who today is anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, during a home-school lesson and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with journalist and former NBC5 anchor Carol Marin.

At five years of age, all of the attention did not seem out of place. “I just thought it was part of the class,” said Ryan. “In retrospect I see that my parents had the courage to take a chance and make a difference,” she said.

Ryan believes her MBA degree will open up new opportunities for her career and her own family.

“It was a big deal for me to get this master’s degree, and I’m glad I found the courage and took a chance,” said Ryan, who convinced a co-worker at Sears to pursue an MBA at Roosevelt in 2011. “I will always be grateful that Roosevelt University took a chance on me,” she added.

“My only regret is that my father could not be there with the rest of my family to see me walk across the Auditorium Theatre stage for my degree,” said Ryan.

Ryan’s father was able to see his eldest daughter receive her master’s degree in Neurophysiology from Loyola University, but passed away in 2005 before his youngest daughter, Amy, had enrolled in law school.

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