In October 2022, we published the first student success story in our 12-part series for the Greater Texas Foundation grant, Harnessing Course Sharing to Support Guided Pathways at Scale. To measure the progress of our grant project, DigiTex identified several success metrics. To fulfill one of these metrics, we are identifying students who have taken courses through our grant project and who have found these courses to be important to their success at their respective institutions. We are pleased to share the second of these stories below!
Written by Heather Walker, Program Coordinator, DigiTex
Broc Kieschnick from Vernon, TX, graduated from high school in 2020 and is now a senior in the Animal Science program at Texas A&M University, College Station. His dad, who is a farmer, also graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in Animal Science. Since Broc can remember, he’s always wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps. Growing up on a farm, Broc had an opportunity to care for animals, and learn a great deal about plants and how they are used to create feed for the animals. After he graduates, he plans to apply to veterinary school in Summer 2023.
As a part of his application to vet school, Broc needed some physics courses. Although he could have taken these classes in person at A&M, he wanted to go home for the summer so that he could shadow his local vet and gain some experience for his application. He was originally planning to take his physics courses at Vernon College, but he soon learned that these classes were not offered at Vernon over the summer. Paula Whitman, Chair of the Math and Science division at Vernon College, instead pointed him to DigiTex, where he was able to access the classes that he needed via digital course sharing powered by Acadeum.
He found the classes to be very user-friendly, the instructor to have a dry and witty sense of humor, and the content of the courses to be well-aligned with the tests. He did mention that it was more challenging to take physics courses during the summer due to the compressed nature of the classes, in which an entire semester’s worth of content is covered in five weeks. However, he found the workload to be manageable and feels that the content that they covered will be helpful to him in his career as a vet. He has seen his own vet use physics in various ways, including to lay a cow down and to reset a dislocated jaw on a dog, so he knows firsthand that the material he covered in his classes will be useful.
Thanks to these classes, Broc will be able to graduate in December 2023, a semester ahead of schedule, and will have completed his degree in 3 ½ years instead of four years. Without these classes, he would have had to take his physics courses at A&M over two semesters, which would have pushed back some of his Animal Science courses and caused him to graduate later than he had hoped.
When asked what advice he has for any students who are considering taking online courses through DigiTex powered by Acadeum, Broc shared that his digital classes had helped to remove a lot of the stress from the experience. While summer classes can be challenging, Broc found that the key to his success was taking things one step at a time and breaking the work down into small chunks. Overall, he found his classes to be a very good experience and said that he actually enjoyed learning physics!
