Caroline Morris: An Alumna Whose Peers Changed Her Career

Caroline Morris, an alumna of the UGA online Masters in Food Technology program, and current McDonald’s Protein Manager, cultivated an interest in food beginning in high school. She won a few culinary competitions through Vocational Industrial Clubs of America, so when he didn’t find her calling at the University of Georgia as an undergraduate student, she took an offer at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island and attained her associate degree in Culinary Arts. She decided to enroll in the UGA online Masters in Food Technology program after some mail marketing. For her, it was all about the flexibility of the program; the ability to “do work, family and go back to school.”

The online program wasn’t what she expected. Caroline had a culinary background, and the program consisted of mostly food science majors, covering a very technical range of things. “I remember the language they used was unfamiliar to me,” Caroline recounted. “I had to look up a lot of the terminology just to understand what they were talking about.” After she came back from her first class in tears, her husband reassured her that in a few weeks, she would be speaking with the same jargon. Sure enough, Caroline worked extremely hard, to overcome the difficulties that her food background posed. Soon, talking about things like hydrocolloids, once a foreign subject, became part of her daily conversations.

The diligence she paid in classes truly paid off, when a couple of guys in her cohort who worked at Wayne Farms, a large vertically-integrated poultry producer, pushed her to take a job opening at the company. She thought she didn’t have the food science background for it, but they insisted she did, since the job had a culinary component to it. They all put in good words for her, and she ended up getting the job. Matt Cosson, one of her peers-turned-coworkers, remarked later on how highly he thinks of Caroline, due to the evolution of their peer relationship.

Caroline has stayed in touch with some of her classmates, and thinks that interactions with her professors also reached beyond the classroom. Dr. Louise Wicker, who retired last year after over 15 years at UGA, would contact Caroline several times a year and Caroline also wrote letters on behalf of another professor of hers, Dr. Aaron Brody, when he was up for awards. They frequent many events together, and Caroline will attend certain functions to recruit students for the UGA Masters in Food Technology program.

“There are two pivotal things in my life, and those were my culinary degree and my food science degree in Masters in Food Technology,” Caroline said. “Those were game changers for me.”