Alex Jones is a student of the University of Georgia online Master of Internet Technology program, scheduled to graduate this spring, and he’s had a rather different experience than his other classmates. This is because he also works full-time within the UGA Terry College of Business Management Information Systems department.

Jones did his undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia as well, graduating with a political science degree right into the midst of the economic recession. He perceptively realized that there weren’t many options for a political science undergraduate at that time, so he found a job in the Management Information Systems department at the UGA Terry College of Business. After a little while working full-time, Jones considered getting his master’s degree. He knew he could make use of UGA’s Tuition Assistance Program. “I love the University of Georgia,” Jones says. “So if I could stick around in Athens a little longer, I was totally fine with that.” 

This is Jones’ first experience with online courses and, while it is a little strange for him, he has the benefit of being colleagues with his professors within the Terry College of Business. “Online learning definitely has its challenges, and I’m lucky enough that I’m in the department, so I can just walk over and ask my professor about something,” says Jones. People in his class know that he works in the department, so sometimes they will ask him to pose urgent questions to the professors. However, the MIT professors are also excellent at responding to their emails, and they will even Google Hangout with their students to talk to them face to face if questions arise.

The most interesting part of the experience for Jones has been the experiential learning project that MIT students perform in their last two semesters. It’s one of the more collaborative of the group projects that online students work on, since it involves jointly planning and executing an information technology project for a client in the Athens or Atlanta area. Jones is group members with Julie Jewell, a previously profiled student on the UGA Online blog. “This group project is 100 percent collaborative, and none of us are in the same place,” Jones says. “We’re constantly emailing, calling, getting on Google Hangouts, using GitHub to share documents and just coding together.” In order to combat some of the problems that arise with purely online collaboration, Jones’ group met together at Jewell’s house outside of Atlanta earlier in the year. At this meeting, Jones had the opportunity to meet one of his group members who he’d never met in person for the first time after a year and a half of being in the same cohort. One of their other group members is from China and doesn’t have a car, so he had to rent a car to get to the group meeting. The strategy worked well, so the group is planning on doing another meeting soon, either in Atlanta or Athens. 

Jones plans on moving into the consulting industry after earning his MIT degree. He plans to maintain the close network he’s part of, that includes his online professors and his student cohort, especially those who he’s participating in his project with.