John Murray is a systems engineer at L3Harris Technologies near New York, where he has lived all his life. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics at a prestigious private Jesuit university in 2016 and wanted to pursue graduate studies in aerospace engineering, but he also wanted to begin his career. He knew online degree programs would allow him to work full-time while he earned the degree, so after a year at L3Harris, he decided to start looking for a master’s program.
“What really got me hooked on The University of Alabama was when I saw the cost of tuition. I said, ‘That can’t be right. This can’t be possible, because everyone else is charging nearly three times that amount per credit hour, so this can’t be right.’ Then I realized that UA Online offers the same rate to students whether they’re in state or out of state, and I thought that was pretty remarkable. So right away, that skyrocketed it to the top of my list.”
Thanks to recent changes from his employer, John now has a tuition reimbursement plan, but at the time, he was thinking he would have to bear the entire cost of his education on his own, so tuition rate was a critical factor in his decision-making.
John began the master’s program in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics in 2017. The program includes prerecorded lectures that students can watch at their convenience, and John said that this flexibility was another major win for him to maintain his work-life balance. “I take a bus to and from work every day, and I’m able to watch my lectures on my commute — it’s been a productive use of my time, and I’m really grateful for that.”
The tuition and convenience may have drawn him in, but how does this New Yorker feel about earning his degree from UA? “The more I’ve engaged with the school, the more I see and read the updates and messages from the president — I just love what I’m seeing. Even though I’ve never set foot on campus, I feel very connected to it. For example, I noticed a ‘pay a meal forward’ initiative online where students can pay for meals for other students who can’t afford food. And the SGA offers interest-free loans to students in need. I went to a small religious school for undergrad where I had a great experience, and we talked that talk about charity and goodwill, but we didn’t walk the walk the way I’m seeing Alabama does.”
John recalled another time he saw this sense of charity on display at the University. He was preparing for a midterm and watching a lecture for his space systems class where his professor, Dr. John Baker, was talking about a local CubeSat initiative he works with to encourage K-12 interest in STEM. “He started to stray further from the space designs and more towards talking about the kids and the importance of showing them what opportunities are out there, discussing HUBZones and food deserts and how incensed he was at the idea of kids going hungry in his own community. I was neck-deep in these notes about trajectory design, but I had to look up and see this aerospace engineering professor with no requirement at all to talk about these issues — but it was important enough to stop the class and discuss it for a second. I’d never seen that passion from a professor in my undergrad years, but here he was walking that walk so well.”
Incidentally, this space systems class had immediate relevance to his work responsibilities as a systems engineer. “It dealt with a lot of requirements validation and verification. These are big buzz words in our industry, and the class covered this concept in systems engineering called the V diagram. It was just something I’d seen on papers at work and never had a comprehensive education on, but we dove right into it in that course, and I learned every part of it — the systems engineering process and life cycle. So that was very helpful to have the academic background on stuff I was doing for work.”
John’s coursework has been useful in other ways as well. “When I started, I thought I would have to leave my current company to best use the skills because the degree deals with propulsion hardware for building rocket engines and other related topics, and that’s not really what we did here. But in this beautiful, harmonious, life-works-out sort of way, I’ve gone in a new direction toward spacecraft systems engineering, and while I’ve been taking that track with my degree, my company has been getting some new work that is relevant to those skills. I’m better positioned now to help with those initiatives.”
John expects to graduate in the spring of 2020, and his trip to Tuscaloosa for his graduation ceremony will be his first time on campus. He’s excited to visit the University and meet his professors. “In addition to giving my dad a winning college football team to root for, I’ve felt so happy to call myself part of the community at Alabama.”
Published: August 30th, 2020