A master's degree was always in the big picture for Christine Gebara. But, in 2017, when she graduated from Tech with her BSAE, a dream job at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab was also in that picture.
"There is no place that does the sort of work we do at JPL," says Gebara, who jumped at the chance to work as a mechanical engineer at JPL. "The motivation to pursue a Distance Learning MS degree really kicked in when I saw that all of the really smart people at JPL -- colleagues who could think through complex problems in a comprehensive fashion - had master's and Ph.Ds. I wanted to do what they do, so I made the commitment."
Gebara describes her DLP graduate school experience as very similar to its bricks-and-mortar counterpart: every day, after work, she goes home to do her graduate work.
"Except one thing," she says, with a laugh. "Some of my graduate work actually overlaps with my job. And, in addition to working with my AE faculty advisor on my degree, I'm collaborating with him on some research that he and JPL are both interested in."