This World Traveler Came Back to Her Roots to Pursue Her Online M.Ed.

Emily Heath LaFon is a UGA graduate student living in Munich, Germany.  A native of Georgia, LaFon has been teaching at an international school in Germany for the past four years where she has a classroom of 19 third graders representing 17 nations. When she made the move, she didn’t know a word of German, but now she’s engaged to be married to a German man. A year and a half ago, she decided she wanted to pursue her Master of Education in Educational Psychology, Gifted and Creative Education and chose to enroll in her alma mater’s online degree program.

After her last semester as an undergraduate student at UGA, Emily participated in the Consortium for Overseas Student Teacher (COST) program which sent her to New Zealand from May to October 2009. She came back to Georgia, began to teach at Wilson Creek Elementary School in Johns Creek, Ga., and realized she wanted to teach overseas. When she was in Poland on a European backpacking trip, she got an email from her current school about an opportunity to teach in Germany and was hired. Within ten days, she got back to Georgia, packed up her apartment and classroom, and moved to Munich, where she’s made a home for herself over the past four years. 

Last February, Emily attended a professional development course that inspired her to go back to school. She began researching different programs and found out that UGA was offering a fully online program in educational psychology. “I think definitely because I had already graduated from UGA, I knew it had a great education program,” Emily says about her choice to enroll in UGA’s online Educational Psychology program.

Emily has felt quite positively about her online experience. “I really appreciated how personal the experience has been, despite it being online,” Emily said. “To have contact with really wonderful professors who are regularly reaching out has really impressed me.”