Quinnon Duke

Meet Quinnon Duke

Name: Quinnon Duke

Age: 29

Employer: The United States Marine Corps

Big Hurdle: Finding a degree program that provided enough flexibility for members of the military.

School: Grantham University

Target: B.A. in Engineering

Always a man of action, Quinnon D., 29, found more for himself in the U.S. military than he ever had in the traditional classroom setting.

He is the first to confess that as a younger man he wasn't much of a student.

"I went to a regular university for a long time but didn't accomplish anything because I can't stand sitting in a classroom," says Quinnon, who tried accounting and finance at Utah State University between 1996-2000.

"I've always loved numbers, but neither of those fields did it for me... I just wanted to party and wasn't ready to buckle down."

To help defray the cost of tuition, Quinnon joined the Marine Reserves after his first year at Utah State.

It wasn't long before Quinnon encountered problems in attempting to get his curriculum to accommodate his military responsibilities.

"Being in the military, I'd have to just take off, go on trips," Quinnon says, "and anything else in life has to get put on hold, that's just how it is... but there was no flexibility at the traditional school."

As one of approximately 30,000 students, Quinnon felt anonymous and received little personal attention to his special situation. "There was no guidance," he says flatly.

So when Quinnon went active duty in 2001, he decided to leave his state university behind for good.

After a couple years demonstrating his skill in the field and potential for leadership, a superior took him aside and asked him what his plans were for later.

"They want to put you in the direction of having something to do after your military career, even if it's thirty or forty years in the future," Quinnon explains.

That's when Quinnon found Grantham.

Resuming his B.A. online in 2003, Quinnon found that the school worked well for him through deployment.

"It's a very military-friendly school," he says, remarking that Grantham hires military student advisors to better tailor programs for its students in active duty.

Though his Internet connections abroad were sometimes slow and fickle, Quinnon didn't encounter the rigid inflexibility that he had experienced at his previous college.

And it's a good thing that Grantham makes it easy for people like him, because although Quinnon's tuition grant covers his academic expenses, he's heard too many stories about other military students who are unable to keep up with less flexible programs.

"If circumstances make it so you can't complete courses and the school's not willing to work with you, even put your classes on hold, you're paying the government that money right back."

Grantham uses online platforms as well as mailed text, and students are invited to schedule times with the instructors for phone appointments.

Instructors also have mandatory time slots to be in class chat, so that, as Quinnon puts it, "students can chat with them in the school's environment."

Another bonus of the class chat rooms is a separate blog.

"The blog's pretty cool because there's a place where the students can log in, ask other students questions in their same discipline." He also describes how "people who have graduated stick around and answer questions to help other people out."

Finally enrolled in a school that's right for him, this time around Quinnon is applying his love of numbers to a program in Electronics Engineering Technology.

Though he's not exactly sure what job this major might land him down the road, he's confident that his studies will pay off when he's ready to leave the military.

"If I go twenty or thirty years in military and then retire, I won't have hard time finding job," he says assuredly.

"A degree would be just a bonus that puts me above next person, or makes me eligible for a higher position within a company."

He adds: "When you've already been successful in life and have good personal skills, and now you're just adding on top of that some kind of education, I think employers are just looking for any type of degree completion, not necessarily from a traditional school."

When asked what he's learned about himself in his endeavor to finish his B.A. online, he says it's great to feel like an academic success and to have finally found an area of study that he genuinely enjoys.

"I like being challenged and learning something," he says. "It's much better than someone handing me a piece of paper that doesn't mean anything."

Apparently Quinnon's opinion matters to the people at Grantham as well.

He was recently invited to take part in an in-person focus group with nine other students from around the country. "We spent the day talking about how Grantham could improve its system," he says.

"There were a lot of suggestions that the school really took in. And giving the faculty the opportunity to see the students made it more personal for them too, I think."

He mentions that Grantham has already started to implement some of the other students' suggestions and hopes that they'll get to his soon: currently the school sends him any books he needs, but he badly wants to replace those e-books.

Why? "I've already got enough stuff to carry around in Iraq," he says. ...Fair enough.