At 50, Nicky Mullinos went back to university and found her way forward

Her undergraduate qualification was a diploma, and for years she searched for a way to complete a fourth year and turn it into a degree. Eventually, she found the Visual Communication Honours programme at the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography.

The Academy assessed her academic record (yes, she had to dig out those 30-year-old results) and, fortunately, the communication work she had done throughout her career enabled her to submit a professional portfolio as part of her application.

And just like that, Mullinos was going back to school.

Back in the classroom

Mullinos arrived at orientation nervous and surrounded by students nearly 30 years younger than her. But when she walked into her class, she discovered that she was not the only older student. Several of them were returning to study, changing direction or finding new ways forward.

For Mullinos, the pivot was partly about being rejected by The Algorithm. There was a time when she could submit her CV, secure an interview and have the opportunity to show someone who she was. Today, if her qualifications do not meet an algorithm’s requirements, she can be digitally dismissed before a real person ever sees her application. Her answer was to return to higher education.

The students’ first task was to create a presentation introducing themselves and the things that interested them. Mullinos watched the recent graduates working with multiple screens open, pulling images across different platforms at remarkable speed. She was still operating at the right-click, copy-and-paste level. She panicked.

Mullinos genuinely thought she was going to be left behind and, at first, perhaps she was. But with the support of the Academy’s Academic Resource Centre, she quickly began developing her skills across unfamiliar platforms.

That early experience taught her one of the most important lessons of the year: not knowing how to do something does not mean you cannot learn.

Creative Exchange in Mbare

During their second month, the honours class travelled to Harare, Zimbabwe, for Creative Exchange. This week-long programme takes honours students into a new environment to help address the visual communication needs of an organisation connected to the Academy.

In 2025, the class worked with Mbare Art Space, where artist Moffat Takadiwa uses art to bring new life to old spaces, create opportunities and strengthen community.

Situated in historic Mbare, a former place of consumption has been transformed into a place where art is made, and ideas are given room to grow. Mbare Art Space is much more than a physical venue. It is a growing network of artists and a platform connecting local creatives with the international art community. The organisation needed two murals, a new website, wayfinding, artist profiles for an international art fair, merchandise and any other visual communication opportunities the students identified.

To Mullinos, the possibilities felt limitless. Working outside the classroom brought the group together in a way no ordinary assignment could. They shared the nerves of solving a problem for a real client, the excitement of an adventure and the experience of finding their way around an unfamiliar city.

As an older student, Mullinos had the chance to immerse herself in a full week of creative practice. She worked not only on her allocated project but also contributed wherever there was capacity and something useful to be done.

Making her first mural

Mullinos’s main project was a mural for the exterior entrance wall of Mbare Art Space, honouring people from the area who had made a lasting impression on its history and community.

Mbare was originally known as Harare. In 1982, that name was given to Zimbabwe’s capital city and the township became known as Mbare. Once the lively centre of Black urban life, the area developed a powerful identity shaped by community, music, sport and culture. Rufaro Stadium famously hosted Bob Marley and the Wailers during Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations.

Today, one of the area’s former beer halls has become Mbare Art Space, a vibrant creative hub containing artists’ studios, offices, an exhibition hall and a digital centre for giving back to the community.

Working alongside the resident artists, responding to the environment and pushing ideas further created an extraordinary opportunity for growth. Mullinos worked with CaliGraph, a prominent Zimbabwean public-art and street-mural collective founded in 2017 by Chinhoyi University graduates Nyasha Jeche and Marcus Zvinavashe.

She had never helped to create a mural before. Learning how to enlarge and trace an image, cut a stencil and apply it to a seven-by-three-metre wall using iron oxide was thrilling. It took a team to carry the mural across the finish line, but the experience, and the excitement Mullinos felt, was almost indescribable.

Responding to the textures of Mbare

Mullinos was also captivated by the textures surrounding her. The resident artists frequently use found and discarded materials in their work, and Mbare Art Space was alive with weathered surfaces, unexpected details and layers of visual history. In response, she designed a collection of branded postcards that the organisation could use as thank-you notes or sell as merchandise.

At Mbare, the only limit to what the students could create was the extent of their own curiosity. If they noticed an opportunity and were willing to respond to it, there was room for the idea.

The week solidified them as a class and established the spirit that carried them through the rest of the year. Whenever someone became stuck or unsure, the others would step in to offer feedback, contribute an idea or simply listen.

Creative Exchange did more than broaden their thinking. It taught them how to support one another and set them up to succeed as a group.

Finding her academic feet

After Creative Exchange, the students moved into their self-directed projects. This was an opportunity to identify something that had not been discussed or explored deeply enough, research it and develop a creative response. Through a series of Crit Labs – presentations in which they received feedback from supervisors and fellow students – their projects gradually became what they needed to be.

Having spent her career in communications, Mullinos found academic writing challenging. But challenging did not mean unattainable. It pushed her well beyond her comfort zone and taught her how to research more deeply, interrogate ideas and translate theory into something her creative project could question, support or expand upon.

The first few chapters of her thesis were difficult. Then she found her feet and she was off. Mullinos trained as a textile designer, so her thesis explored the memories held by textiles. It was something she had always sensed but had never taken the time to examine properly.

That was where so much of her growth happened. Investigating ideas she had never previously considered made her feel young again. The process pushed her to become a better writer and researcher, but it also helped her find her own voice and understand how she wanted to tell a story.

What returning at 50 gave her

Mullinos will always be grateful to her classmates for accepting her as a peer. They never treated her as anything other than a fellow student, and they included her in activities beyond the classroom too.

What a privilege it was, at 50, to return to higher education. Her undergraduate years had been three decades earlier. She had worked hard, but had always felt that she could have done more. Her honours year gave her an unexpected opportunity to make peace with that younger version of herself, not by trying to rewrite the past, but by showing up differently in the present.

As a career pivot, the year gave Mullinos far more than an additional qualification. She entered an academic environment, stepped repeatedly into discomfort and learned that she could find her way through it. She discovered how to support her ideas through research and express them through art.
It was a year filled with learning, joy and occasional frustration. Most importantly, it was a year in which she learned to trust herself and the process.

Mullinos is still friends with her classmates today. Her experience reminds her of words she once heard trend forecaster Li Edelkoort share: the old need to learn from the young, and the young need to learn from the old. When generations come together, everyone benefits from the combination of lived experience and new ways of thinking.

That is exactly what her honours year gave her. It taught Mullinos that returning to study is not about age. Nor is changing direction, learning something unfamiliar or beginning again. It is about the will to start, the determination to continue and the courage to discover what she is still capable of becoming.

@nickymullinos @mbare_art_space @stellenboschacademy

The Stellenbosch Academy of Design & Photography’s Honours programme gives creatives the skills to produce an independent, self-directed visual communication project. Designed for both recent graduates and those looking to pivot their careers, the programme provides the experience needed to take a creative project from problem statement and proposal through to execution and exhibition.