Jackie Doyle did one semester of online learning at another university but didn’t get much out of the experience. She recalls one professor saying, “Good luck with what you’ve got going on.” Doyle ’15 Lib, ’18 MEd Edu, who was raising four children while working full time as a career services administrator at a small college in upstate New York, had a lot going on. But she wanted to give her pursuit of an online bachelor’s degree one more shot.

Seven years later, she had a bachelor’s degree in human resources management and a master’s in higher education administration from World Campus, and a job that she believes she never would have landed otherwise.

Doyle says she had always felt some remorse for not finishing college after graduating from high school in the 1980s. World Campus’s asynchronous courses allowed her to go at her own pace, which was two courses per semester. “When my kids came home from school and were doing their homework, I would get on my laptop and do my schoolwork,” she says. “I think it was a good thing for my kids to see. It was like we were in it together.”

Doyle liked that she was able to tailor her master’s studies toward career management, and that paid off not long after she graduated. A former colleague told her about an open position for director of career management in the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University. Doyle says she felt she was “punching above my weight class” to apply, but her new boss told her after hiring her she had never had someone recommended so highly for the position. “People aren’t necessarily on a linear trajectory,” Doyle says. “To have institutions that can meet them where they’re at … it changed my life.”