Melissa Davis has held several positions at Utah Valley University, including her current role in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. And she’s held several degrees. But she’s never been able to call herself a UVU graduate until now.
Melissa Davis has held several positions at Utah Valley University, including her current role in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. And she’s held several degrees. But she’s never been able to call herself a UVU graduate until now.
And it just so happens that this week, two other generations of women in her family will join her.
Melissa, her mother, Diana Flygare, and her daughter, Hadley Davis, will all receive bachelor’s degrees from UVU on April 29 as part of the Class of 2026.
“I’m just so proud,” Melissa said. “[My mother] told us how important education was, and she had sacrificed her own to put my dad through graduate school for seven years. I was afraid she wouldn't finish, and so she did, and we're so, so happy that it just happened to be all the same semester.”
For Diana, completing her degree is the culmination of a lifelong aspiration. She began taking classes from UVU at age 17, when the school was known as Utah Technical College. Her original intent was to pursue a master’s degree in social work and become a counselor. But, she said, life had different plans, as the births of her children and various economic obstacles interfered.
“Things kept coming up,” she said. “I had to go back to work full time, which meant that I had to back out of school, which was a huge disappointment for me.”
Diana said she kept a little Christmas ornament of a graduate in a cap and gown on her desk at work, as a reminder that someday she would return to finish what she started.
Eventually, Diana met and married longtime UVU employee Grant Flygare, who encouraged her to complete her degree — an achievement she now gets to share with her family.
“It’s incredible,” she said. “It’s like a dream come true. It’s just beyond exciting for me.”
Melissa, meanwhile, has already had a successful career as an English teacher, on the foundation of two prior degrees from Utah State University. But she soon realized her real passion was nutrition, something she hadn’t studied. After a few attempts were cut short due to family relocations and the births of her children, Melissa finally found herself in a position to take advantage of UVU’s new nutrition minor.
“I was looking at the course catalog, and public health was such a close match to things I care about deeply, like access to healthy foods,” Melissa said. “So I thought I'd just do public health. And then during my first semester, they put a nutrition minor on. And I'm like, ‘Well, this is working out.’”
Meanwhile, Diana and Hadley are both receiving bachelor’s degrees in psychology, a field Hadley said interests her because of the way her own brain works.
“As someone who has ADHD and depression, I think it's interesting to learn more,” Hadley said. “I just like learning about the brain, how people work. I think it’s fascinating.”
While the three women’s course schedules never overlapped to the point that they had classes together, Hadley said she’d already had that experience with another family member: her father, John, who completed his bachelor’s degree in psychology a few years earlier.
“[John] had already earned a degree in computer science, and he is a CTO, so he has an established career, but he realized that in leadership and management, he was missing this huge piece of communication, people, and how to understand the ways people interact,” Melissa said.
She said the family has appreciated the opportunity to broaden their educational experiences by taking advantage of the tuition waivers provided to UVU employees.
“It's just been such a good experience to be here as an employee and as a student, and just kind of see the care that UVU shows,” Melissa said. “I work with amazing people. They support values that I care deeply about. ‘Come as you are’ — that's huge. We have programs and mentors and resources for everyone, and we just want to help them get to their best self.”
“Don’t be afraid to ask for help,” Hadley added. “Because people here will want to help you.”
And for anyone who may have had to leave their education unfinished, Diana said she’s living proof that it’s never too late.
“If that's part of the dream, go for it,” she said. “It's just not too late. If I can do it, anybody can do it.”
