In 1941, Virginia Hislop put plans to write her master’s degree thesis on hold after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and launched the United States into World War II.

Love also had something to do with it.

Her fiancé at Stanford University had been called to serve in the military, and Hislop said they decided to get married so she could move with him to Oklahoma. George Hislop had been assigned to a teaching team at Fort Sill Army Base.

“I was just about to graduate, but all best-laid plans were put aside during the war,” said Hislop, now living in Yakima, Wash., where she is known to family and friends as Ginger.

“I always thought I could pick things up again sometime along the way,” she said.

Eighty-three years later at age 105, she finally got that chance.

On June 16, Hislop returned to Stanford University to receive the Master of Arts degree in education that she had come close to finishing at age 22.

When Dan Schwartz, the dean of Stanford’s graduate school of education, learned from Hislop’s son-in-law Doug Jensen that she had missed out on her dream eight decades ago, he decided that Stanford could help make up for lost time.

Schwartz did some research and learned that a thesis was no longer required for the coursework Hislop had completed before the war.

“The rules had changed since 1941 for her requirements, and she deserved a diploma,” he said. “I looked up her transcript and saw that she’d definitely earned it.”

During his opening commencement speech, Schwartz called Hislop to the stage to get her diploma before anybody else. “I told everyone that usually you give a degree before someone starts their life, but now you get to see a degree awarded after their life has occurred,” he said.

“Ginger is a very sharp woman, and to see the beauty of her accomplishment was a wonderful thing,” he added. “When I met her, my first thought was, ‘Hey, wait a minute — this is someone in her 80s.’”

Jensen said he decided to contact Schwartz when he noticed that Hislop was feeling down after the death of his wife (and her daughter), Anne Jensen, last year. Anne was Hislop’s second child. She has also outlived her son William, who died in 2011, and her husband, who died in 1986.

“She and Anne were really close, so I began going up to Yakima and spending time with Ginger,” said Jensen, 79, who lives in Oakland, Calif. He and Anne were both Stanford graduates.

“Over the dinner table, Ginger began telling me stories, including how she’d gotten married before the war and wasn’t able to finish her thesis and get her master’s degree,” Jensen said. “Since all she was missing was a thesis, I thought maybe Stanford could give her an honorary degree.”

When Schwartz told him the university could do better than that, Jensen phoned Hislop with the good news.

“I thought he was kidding me,” Hislop said. “It was a wonderful surprise, even 83 years late.”

After graduating from high school in Southern California in 1936, Hislop said, she had hoped to become a lawyer, but her strict father put his foot down.

“It was a different time, and he didn’t think women should go to law school,” she said.

Instead, Hislop earned a bachelor’s degree in education at Stanford, then she completed the required coursework for her master’s degree.

After she met George Hislop at Stanford and they got married, she concentrated on raising their two children in Yakima, where they had moved to help George’s father run the family sheep ranch.

She said she wasn’t bothered at putting off her thesis, because plenty of other lives were also uprooted during the war. “I spent five years as an Army wife, which I figure is the equivalent of a master’s degree,” Hislop said.

Even without an official master’s diploma, she said, she put her Stanford education to good use by serving on the Yakima School District Board of Directors for 13 years.

“I decided to run for the board when my daughter’s school told her she’d have to take home economics instead of advanced English,” she said. “I told them she could cook at home and that school was a place for academics.”

Hislop was also a founding member of Yakima Community College’s board of directors, and for two decades she served on the board of directors of Heritage University, which is on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Toppenish, Wash. She said her emphasis was helping Native American women have more access to education.

Although Hislop no longer serves on the board, she said she has remained healthy into her 100s by pulling weeds in her garden, attending educational lectures and symphony concerts, and doing her own grocery shopping.

“I no longer drive, but I have friends who will take me where I need to go,” she said, noting that she has lived in the same house since 1959.

Hislop’s advice to anyone hoping to reach her age is to “have some interests outside of what you’re going to have for breakfast.” “I would also say to treasure your health,” she said. “Things will be a lot better for you if you pay attention to your body and not stress out so much.”

She said it was easy to relax at Stanford’s commencement ceremony because “everything moved along at a quick clip.” “I’m always afraid of things like that lasting too long,” she said. “I was very happy it was brief.”

She still smiled, though, when she received a standing ovation after Schwartz awarded her with her master’s degree as four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren looked on.

“We’re incredibly proud of her and the legacy of education that she turned into a family value,” said grandson Michael Jensen, 49. He said that he and his cousins have always referred to Hislop as the “Evil Elf” because of her unfiltered comments at family gatherings over the holidays.

“She has a wicked sense of humor, and we can always count on grandma to liven things up,” Jensen said.

Hislop said they can also count on her to not display her new master’s degree in the living room.

“It’s now hanging in my closet, where I plan to look at it from time to time and remind myself that I’m a pretty good scholar,” she said.