- Alumna; Online
It happened one night in Baghdad in 2004.
Gemma McGowan '10, then a first lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps, was surfing the Web, looking for college classes that her soldiers could take online.
"As a platoon leader, I wanted to get soldiers involved in school, and to be a good role model, I took a class," Gemma says.
Gemma signed up with SNHU Online for a graduate course in organizational leadership, a welcome distraction.
But it wasn't always easy to find a free computer, or to get online. If a mortar hit the area, it would disable the Internet connection. At other times, there were more soldiers than computers to accommodate them.
Gemma says it helped that her professors were sympathetic.
"If I disappeared for a day, I came back," she says, recalling the blackouts. "It wasn’t that bad."
A year after finishing her first course, Gemma enrolled in the master's program in organizational leadership.
She took one class at time for the next several years, earning her master’s degree and two graduate certificates, one in leadership of nonprofit organizations and another in human resource management.
"They changed the way I think," Gemma says, recalling a professor who urged students to forget about "thinking outside the box" and "start thinking as if the box never existed."
Now a civilian working for the U.S. Department of Defense, Gemma says her graduate studies prepared her for "the next level."
"It has helped me so much, and made me a stronger leader in my organization," she says.
