Student Testimonials

After graduation, I accepted a new position with Opportunity Council working closely at the state level for our Northwest Region. This role is a promotion within my agency, and I am now supporting strategic planning for early learning coalitions. So many of my AHE projects are building into reality.  It has been exciting and challenging to apply all the work I did in the AHE program to work I am currently building.  

I am also teaching the Early Childhood Environment Class - ECED 170 at Skagit Valley College. This is the class I designed during my final quarter in the AHE Program.   I’ve received great feedback and look forward to my own continued learning and growth as an instructor. I continue to draw from so much of what I learned in the program and apply it daily in my work.  

I’m incredibly grateful for your support throughout the program—your encouragement, honest feedback, and guidance made a lasting impact.

I am settling into my new program at WSU and I wanted to share with you how the experience has been, to date.  I am happy to report that things are going quite well. I was able to use AHE 501 & AHE 571 in place of pre-requisite courses for our research sequence.  We take a sequence of four research courses and it would have put me behind or forced me to add an extra course to my load if the pre-requisite had not been met with my AHE research courses. While I was initially concerned I might miss something that I would need from this pre-req, I was happy to discover that AHE had more than prepared me for the rigors of my first research course: Epistemology, Inquiry, and Representation. I was unsure how truly prepared I was for a PhD program, and while the coursework is demanding, I feel that I was well prepared to begin this academic endeavor.

I know that not all of my PhD cohort feels this way, nor were they exposed to many of the topics we are currently tackling. I feel fortunate that during my time in AHE I was able to obtain such a breadth of coverage concerning higher education and research. I know that I have just begun, but I felt it was important to share how well AHE prepared me for this inaugural semester of my PhD.

Jo Ann Arinder

an AHE Alumni (2018) who went on to complete a PhD program