If James Tague isn’t the oldest graduating senior this year, he thinks he’s pretty close – he’ll turn 27 in the middle of June.

Tague graduated from high school with a 1.8 GPA and went to work for several years at a grocery store, never thinking he would end up back in school.

“I had an epiphany,” Tague said. “I realized that I had to use my God-given talents in some constructive way.”

He enrolled at a community college in his hometown of Seattle and took a double course load, finishing two years of school in half the time. He applied as a transfer student – and GW let him in.

“I sold everything I owned and came out here with two suitcases and not knowing anybody,” said Tague, who is footing his own bill for GW.

Tague, a political science major, said the age gap between him and most of GW’s undergraduate population has been fairly significant at times.

“Quite frequently, my classmates will bring up things they remember from 9/11 and I’ll find them strangely inaccurate, and I’ll realize, oh, they were in elementary school when that happened,” Tague said. “I was already graduated from high school.”

There are other things Tague said he doesn’t understand – referring to a “radically different worldview” of most college students.

“I don’t understand why people would want to get so drunk that they would throw up all over themselves and then sleep past two every day,” Tague said, laughing.

Another unexpected effect of coming to GW was the number of people who came to him for advice, particularly young women.

“I’ve got silver hair, I’ve got kind of a different demeanor,” Tague said. “Sometimes it’s within meeting me once or twice – it might be a classmate, or my roommate’s girlfriend or whatever.”

A devout Catholic, Tague has carved a niche for himself at the Newman Center. This year he headed the GW chapter of the Knights of Columbus, part of a worldwide Catholic fraternal organization that has done community service projects all over the city. He is also currently applying to become a Capitol police officer, with the eventual hope of continuing on to law school one day.

Looking back on his two years at GW, Tague said his times with the Knights were some of the most rewarding in his life, from food and diaper drives they’ve organized to “wheeling old ladies to doctor’s appointments.”

“It’s sort of amazing once you think back on it, what a bunch of pipsqueak college guys with patchy beards can do in their spare time,” Tague said.