Education Online Degree Completion (Distance Learning)

A single mother, Rohr was drawn to Penn’s distance learning program’s flexibility and the instructors’ willingness to work around the busy schedules of students with jobs, families and entire lives happening outside of school.

“You have the freedom to have a full-time job, to make it to events that you need to make it to,” she said. “They want you to be in a quiet environment [for class on Zoom], but there is that flexibility because they understand that as a parent, you want to be there for your kids.”

Rohr had given college a whirl twice before finding Penn, but the timing just wasn’t right for her. When she discovered WPU a few years later, the pieces started to fall into place.

“Ever since I can remember I’ve always wanted to be a teacher,” she said. “I don’t think I had the maturity or the confidence to go about it the first time around.”

Rohr started her education at Malone University in Ohio for a few years before deciding to take a summer off, which turned into a year off. She eventually went for round two at Regent University in Virginia. “I think my confidence was down a little bit and I wasn’t quite sure if [teaching] is what I wanted to do [when I was at Regent]. After having my daughter and realizing that I want her to be proud of me, I want to have a career, it just really reinforced that education is very important to me.”

The distance learning program at WPU gave Rohr the flexibility and push she needed to resume and complete her teaching degree at a time when she wasn’t even sure she was ready to jump back into it.

“I really appreciate that [William Penn University is] very personable,” Rohr said,

adding that the ability to speak so quickly and personally with individuals in the department aided in her quick decision to jump back into her degree with Penn. “I was really nervous [before I applied]. I was thinking maybe in a year I’ll go back, like I was just getting information on the program… I reached out to William Penn and within a week I was talking to advisors, people in the education program. They reached out to me, they Zoomed with me and encouraged me to just apply.”

And so, apply she did. Within two weeks of contacting the department, Rohr was starting her online classes at WPU.

As she now competes her degree in elementary education, Rohr reflects on her experience and the opened doors that made it possible.

Though the program’s flexibility is what drew Rohr to it, its quality of education and focus on teacher preparedness have allowed her to excel in and complete the program, gaining valuable experiences and an education in a way that other universities may not have offered.

“All of the professors are amazing,” she said. “I really appreciate that a lot of them are still in the education realm or they are just shortly leaving the education realm so they are really up-to-date. They have lots of relevant material to bring to all of our classes. That is really nice, because they have so many experiences that they can pull from… I’ve had professors in the past who maybe have gotten out of touch with current teaching strategies or science of how children learn because they haven’t been in the classroom for years; they’ve been professors. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s something just very refreshing about learning from professors who care about teaching, are still teaching.”

Because of her time at Penn and those who helped her through it, Rohr looks forward to soon sharing that same passion of teaching with her own future students.

To other non-traditional students considering working towards a degree, she has just one piece of advice: “It’s definitely more possible than you think it is.”