Guide to Online Education > Online Education In-Depth > Meet Real Online Students > Gary, B.S. in Mathematics
"I've taken classes with meeting requirements and group projects," he recalls none too fondly. "I didn't like the format. You can't all meet at the same time."
Name: Gary Brown
Age: 37
Marital Status: Married
Children: One son
Current Location: North Carolina
Quote: "[The] really great thing about distance education [is] it has no or low impact on family life."
School: Excelsior College
Target: B.S. in Mathematics, 2007
His experience at Touro was the best of his academic career. He conducted a lot of research in the Education Center before focusing on Touro. In the end he liked the simplicity of the application and enrollment processes and the university's track record with serving the needs of the military.
The Army tuition assistance program covered a substantial portion of the tuition, he notes. However, Touro reduced the tuition so that military students don't have to come out of pocket for the balance.
"That was the motivation," he says for selecting that school above others.
In addition, he recalls, "I liked the format. There were five modules. Each module was two weeks long. There were assignments every two weeks which helped keep you on schedule. There were no required class meeting times. And no group projects. That flexibility was very important."
"While I was a PhD student at Touro I was also a graduate assistant. I graded papers and took part in threaded discussions and acted as a liaison between the students and the professor," Gary explains.
"And in return for that they gave me a scholarship that covered almost all of the tuition. I used my GI Bill for the rest."
The biggest challenge of combining schoolwork with soldiering was writing so many papers. "A student is required to write 10-15 papers," he says of his MBA coursework. "Each paper is between 3-10 pages."
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