Students from all over the world are attracted to Tech because of its strong academic acumen. The vast majority of students only get to call the Institute home for four short years before they graduate and start their professional careers, but there is a significant number of graduates who decide to continue their journeys at Tech after obtaining their first degree.
These so-called Double, Triple, Quadruple (or even more) Jackets could be students who decided to continue their education in the same field by pursuing a master’s degree, then a Ph.D., or students who decided to switch their area of study to pursue a bachelors degree in another college on campus.
According to the Tech Alumni Association, of 206,055 living graduates, 25,793 students have at least two degrees from the Institute, making 13% percent of graduates Double Jackets or better. These 25,793 Jackets chose to attend Tech twice in one way or another, consecutively or non-consecutively, for some combination of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.
Of the 25,793 Double Jackets or better, 99.5% earned two or three degrees at Tech, likely representing those who continue their education in the same field, stopping at the master’s or doctorate level.
Going even further into the heights of degree attainment stand 122 Jackets that have earned a total of four degrees, nine Jackets that have earned a total of five degrees, and one jacket stands alone.
This man, Alan Michaels, EE ‘00, M.S. EE ‘01, Ph.D EE ‘09, MATH ‘03, M.S. MATH ‘03, and M.S. OR ‘05, is a sextuple graduate over a period of 11 years. The Technique had the opportunity to sit down with Michaels to discuss his unique journey at Tech and what motivated him to earn so many degrees at the Institute.
Michaels first enrolled at Tech as part of a joint enrollment program while he was a high school student in Norcross, Georgia. While he was in high school, he got a head start by knocking out lower-level mathematics classes. When it came time to apply to college, Michaels said he wasn’t thinking too hard about his options.
“I didn’t really put a lot of thought into where I would go to college. I actually only applied to MIT and got rejected. Then [went to] Georgia Tech because of joint enrollment. I was already basically a student and just regulated out through the fall,” Michaels said.
Even though Tech might not have been Michaels’ first choice, he quickly made a home here. By playing his cards right, seizing opportunities when they came, and not being afraid to put in hard work, Michaels was able to earn his first five degrees in seven years.
“I had to pay my way through college. I started as a teaching assistant, that helped, but in general, I was kind of on a mission to graduate as quickly as I could because once you could become a graduate student, somebody else is paying your tuition,” Michaels said.
He said taking 20 to 24 credit hours a semester allowed him to graduate with his first bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering within two years — timed perfectly to skip final exams in his graduating semester before that policy was changed the following semester.
Michaels earned a fellowship at Texas Instruments, which agreed to help him pay for a year’s worth of graduate school, which he was able to complete in just one semester because of the number of credit hours he was taking before.
Before Michaels could complete his master’s in electrical engineering and start his internship, the dot-com bubble burst, and Texas Instruments laid off his hiring manager, leaving Michaels without a job after earning his master’s degree. Michaels decided to stick around to do more research towards his Ph.D.
With all the classes that Michaels was taking, his other degrees came naturally as he followed his interests.
“By the time I got my degree I wasn’t convinced I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I did fine grade-wise, but my heart is as an applied mathematician. So I’d always take an extra class. I resonated better with the faculty and students over in math. I ended up being a teaching assistant more in math than I ever was in electrical engineering,” Michaels said.
Naturally, Michaels’s schedule got very busy while he was at the Institute. According to Michaels, during his busiest semester, he effectively had 31 credit hours of classes. He was registered for 20 credit hours, was studying for nine credit hours by examination and was teaching an additionaltwo credit hours.
He said to get through it, he had to rely on his multiprocessing abilities. He would listen to lectures while working on assignments and studying for other classes. On top of this, Michaels served a brief stint as the Graduate Student Government Association President and occasionally wrote opinion articles for the Technique.
After graduating, Michaels also studied for an M.B.A. at Carnegie Mellon and then spent 10 years in the industry before returning to academia at Virginia Tech. He said that his time as a teaching assistant at Tech played an important role in his decision to return to academics.
“I love being in the classroom, teaching. When students ask you questions … I found that because I was getting questions from people not in a [similar] background, I had to learn the material better myself to explain it to people that came from different backgrounds. I loved it. I didn’t really think I wanted to go into academia, but I missed teaching when I was in industry,” Michaels said.
Michaels is a tenured faculty member at Virginia Tech working in the National Security Institute. He still gets in the classroom, but a lot of his work revolves around his research as the Director of the Spectrum Dominance Division.
He never intended to earn so many degrees in Tech, but his unique circumstances and genuine passion to learn more about whatever he was interested in at the time kept him motivated to learn more.
“It is cool as a statistic to find out, but that was not intentional. I looked and saw the classes I wanted to take, and generally, I wanted to take more than maybe what was required by the degree program,” Michaels said. “I would say if you’re worried about the badge or the credential, you’re probably going to miss what is intended for you to learn on the way.”
Michaels also reminded students that learning doesn’t stop when you get out of college, as he is soon to graduate for the eighth total time with a degree in theology.