Senior Heidi Miles earned her associate degree 15 years ago, now she’s ready to walk across the stage with her bachelor's

Fifteen years ago, senior Heidi Miles earned her associate degree in mortuary science from Mount Ida College, a small private school outside of Boston that is now part of University of Massachusetts Amherst. Now, she is a mere week away from earning her bachelor's degree, a goal a decade and a half in the making.

Miles is majoring in Business Administration online, a field that ties in closely with her current role. After graduating with her associate degree, Miles began her professional career in the funeral industry, eventually bouncing around between a few different fields before landing in telecommunications, where she has put down roots since. She now works as a sales and marketing coordinator for a small, highly collaborative cooperative where she says she wears a lot of hats. Often many at once.

“The position I have, even though it touches sales and marketing, it also touches customer service. I’m involved in operations, and even billing to some extent. We overlap into a lot of different departments, so the Business Administration degree is really helpful because all the different studies in the program relate to different duties in my job,” Miles said. “I knew that by going back to school for business admin I would be able to learn more and enhance the skills I have, and really just expand on what I’m currently doing.”

Miles had long been interested in returning to school before enrolling at Lees-McRae, but she said she was not entirely sure what to study or where. With her full-time job knew she would need to pursue an online program, and she and her husband—who live in Georgia—love to visit the High Country on vacation. When she found Lees-McRae, which offered great online programming and was located in one of her favorite places in the country, she knew she had found the right institution for her.

With the college’s high-ranking online Business Administration program, Miles had no doubt that this was the perfect place for her to take the next step in her academic and professional career.

“Essentially, I just knew there was more to learn. Going back to school later I saw a great benefit in, because information changes all the time. We’re constantly changing, so I knew that if I went back to school now, what I would be learning would be the most relevant and up-to-date information for the different aspects of that field,” she said. “The great thing is, because I am already established in my career, as I am going through these classes, I can relate to the material.”

Miles said she has already seen the way her time in the classroom has paid off in the office. As part of the program, she completed an internship, which she was able to set up through her current company. This experience, she said, was extremely valuable not only because it helped solidify some of the lessons from class, but also because it helped her to better understand the inner workings of the organization for which she has worked for the past eight years.