October 18, 2004

 

 

Peter B. Gilkey

Professor of Mathematics

President InterInstitutional Faculty

Senate for 2004

 

RE: meeting in La Grande at EOU on 10/15/04

 

 

Peter,

 

I wanted to share my experience with you. I first went to College at age 17 in 1967 at University of Oregon where my father was an alumni. I did turn 18 shortly after my arrival, however I did not pay to much attention to academics but turned my attention to other pursuits like drinking. The short story is that I was placed on academic probation and left at the end of one term.

 

In 1968 the next step was the Army as my draft number was 5. I honorably served in the US Army until 1970 when I was discharged at age 20. I did return to college at Clackamas Community College, also taking night courses at Portland Community College and graduated with an associate’s degree in spring of 1972. That degree did save me much later in life as you will see.

 

I next went to Lewis and Clark College in Portland and dropped out in my senior year to accept a job as vice-president of a construction company in Portland. I later did attend 3 courses at Portland State in 1977-1978 to fulfill the requirement to take the Oregon Real Estate Brokers Exam.  Now I had been to 5 colleges.

 

Around 1999 at age 50 I decided to go back to college, as I wanted to pursue my dream of going to law school. I was working as a consultant in Spokane, and contacted Eastern Washington University. I took one 5-credit course on gender, as it was a requirement while I waited for my transcripts to be assessed. When they finally were, I was told I had to take a bunch of freshman math courses, computer courses and other requirements. This would have taken me a year just to satisfy them.

 

I took to the Internet in search of distance education and of course found Phoenix University, which was quite expensive. In looking for an alternative, stumbled on EOU.

They accepted my Associate Degree from Clackamas Community College and it fulfilled all my lower division requirements, which was a huge relief to me.  I was then able to focus on finishing my degree, which I completed in August of 2001 and was admitted to Law School later that same month. I graduated from Gonzaga University School of Law in May, 2004 Magna Cum Laude and was hired as administrative faculty at EOU in the Distance Education Division in September of 2004.

 

If I had anything less than what I now know as a AAOT I would still be in grad school or maybe would have discouraged completely from finishing my degree as I did not look forward to taking all those 100 level courses.

 

Sincerely

 

Les Balsiger, JD

Director of Student Relations/Marketing

Division of Distance Education

Eastern Oregon University

e-mail: les.balsiger@eou.edu

phone: 541-962-3138