Ingeborg Rapoport's professor accepted her doctoral thesis on diphtheria when she submitted it in 1938 — but the racist rules she faced at her university in Nazi Germany prevented her from completing her studies.

Rapoport was 25 when she turned her paper in, but because she was a woman with a Jewish mother she hit a barrier.

Now, at 102, she's returned to her decades-old project and is readying to receive her degree.

"At the moment that the Nazis came, I was ostracized," she told CBC's Carol Off. "I had a yellow student card."

Her topic was diphtheria, and she completed a thesis and handed it in. Her professor accepted it, but she wasn't allowed to complete an oral exam.

She was instead given a certificate listing the work she'd completed, but it "didn't help in the U.S.A."

She eventually gained entry into an American school, completed her studies and worked as a doctor, first in America and then in East Germany.

Rapoport, who is set to receive her doctorate on June 9, isn't being given an honorary degree.

"It was very hard. Because I'm almost blind, I can't read anything," she told As It Happens. She had friends scour the internet to get research on diphtheria as she tried to pick up the latest and revisit a process she had been forced to drop 77 years ago.

"I learned a lot more about the diphtheria toxin," she said.

That information was put to the test when the dean of the medical school, the head of the examination committee and another professor travelled from Hamburg to Berlin to test her knowledge.

Listen to Rapoport as she tells Carol Off about her life, the difficulties of studying in Nazi Germany and why the University of Hamburg medical school helped her finish her degree.