WGU Student Profile
Meet Larry Manch:
Larry is a model worth emulating for late-blooming career
changers. When Larry was in his late 40s, he decided it was time
to do what he always really wanted to do: become a teacher.
Larry had logged about 30 years of his life working primarily in
retail, from sales, to assistant manager, to manager, to
district manager, to actually owning and operating his own
retail store. He also held a job as an area manager for a
nationwide inventory service. His higher education credentials
for most of his life included a few years of college in which he
never earned a degree.
“In all those years I got
sidetracked and did not finish college, but I always thought that
someday I would go back and get a degree,” Larry says. Working in retail
management, however, posed a severe challenge to achieving his dream. “I
worked an awful lot of hours,” he says, “about 80 to 100 hours a week.
There was no time to go to college.”
In the meantime, Larry got married, and, in typical
late-blooming fashion, he and his wife had two children when
Larry was in his mid to late 40s (the young Manches are currently eight and six years old).
Having children brought an epiphany. “I realized that if I wanted to
spend time with my family, that I had to do something different,” he
explains. Larry then moved down the career chain to a less-consuming
position at an office supply store. “I now had time to go back to
college, but there was no way I could do a traditional brick and mortar
school. We had young kids; we did not want to do daycare and could not
afford it. One of us was going to be home all the time. So it really was
not possible to attend a regular college.”
Enter the WGU Teachers College, a regionally-accredited
competency-based, distance-education institution headquartered in Salt
Lake City, offering NCATE-accredited undergraduate and graduate teacher
education programs.
Larry enrolled in October 2004 and completed all of his
bachelor’s degree course work by December 2005. He did his student
teaching in early 2006 and held a few substitute teaching positions
before ultimately being hired in the fall of 2006 as a 2nd grade teacher
at Montague Village Elementary School in Fort Hood, Texas. “I was
wondering if anyone was going to hire me at my age, but they did,” Larry
says. “I worked extremely hard, and one of the greatest days of my life
was when they called me and said ‘we want you to start tomorrow’. That was a big moment.”
Meet Larry’s Boss:
Principal of Montague Village Elementary,
Debra Burch, says that Larry is not the first person she has hired who
earned an education credential online, “and he will not be the last,
because I value anyone who gets an education any way they can. I realize
that when we are talking about someone who may be going back to school
after another career or later in life, that person is bringing to the
table a lot of experience, unlike the person who goes to college at 18
and graduates and becomes a teacher at 21.”
For hiring decisions, Burch says it’s more about the individual
and “what they were born with. You have to have that calling and know
that this is what you were meant to do. You have to have the talent to
know that when you can’t explain something the first time, you say it in
a different way, not bigger or louder. You have to really want to stick
with it, and that is what I see in Larry Manch, who is a very
intelligent man with a talent for teaching. He cares about his students
and wants to know more about the art of teaching.” Larry is one example
among many self-motivated WGU graduates who have achieved, both
educationally and career-wise, what they wanted to do in relatively
short order.
For More Information, Please Visit the WGU
Teachers College Website.
Reprinted from
"Online Degrees Make the Grade: Employer
Acceptance Now Common."
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