She had just landed a lucrative job in the movies so she felt “really torn” between earning a generous salary and pursuing her longstanding dreams. “I had been wanting to go back to school for years. I had always regretted not having gone to high school, thinking all along that I had to have at least my Grade 12 before the College would touch me. I never knew such a thing as a mature student existed,” she is quoted as saying in a Capilano College press release in the spring of 1972. Strachan didn’t complete high school after she married at the age of 17. But her husband, Mike, was supportive of her enrolling in college even though their children were ages 9, 12 and 13. The highlight of her college career was learning how to conduct research. “I got to write excellent papers on which I got double As,” she says, adding, “I wrote a really excellent paper on the history of the bra.”