Excelsior College’s corporate, association, and government partnerships give people the opportunity to complete their degrees through high-quality programs, affordable and discounted tuition and fees, flexible course schedules, and generous credit-transfer policies. The College’s partnership with Zone 5 Law Enforcement Training Academy in Schenectady, New York, ended up being the perfect opportunity for Michelle Ashley to pursue her higher education.

Ashley, a public campus safety officer from West Sand Lake, New York, was going through training at Zone 5 while she was employed with University Heights Association Inc., a security company for colleges and college housing units. “I became a supervisor and that is when Excelsior and [Zone 5] went into a partnership,” she says. Ashley has an associate degree in business from SUNY Cobleskill but decided to pursue criminal justice. Many of her subordinates also had associate degrees in criminal justice and Ashley wondered what their learning experience had been like. She had also been watching the Zone 5 training pages and saw an announcement to earn an associate degree in criminal justice with Excelsior.

She had previously learned that a lot of her credits from SUNY weren’t going to transfer to other schools, and she would have to essentially start all over again. When she looked deeper at Excelsior, she realized having been at Zone 5 gave her a leg up in making her degree happen. “I was so excited that some of my work I did at Zone 5 transferred as credits over to Excelsior because then that made getting a degree achievable,” says Ashley. When she found out she could complete her criminal justice degree in a year with Excelsior, it became a more tangible dream that Ashley could achieve and not, as she explains, take away from her family time.

Excelsior’s online learning format was perfect for Ashley, who works full-time and the late shift. She admits it was tough to take two classes at once, though. “I strive on making the best grades… Taking two classes at once made it hard to soak in the information. But I pushed through, and was able to finish both classes,” she says. As a student, she had her Zone 5 training on her side and was able to refer to her experience for examples in the discussion topics.

Now she is encouraging her husband, who is a police officer, to pursue his degree with Excelsior. She informs him that with his background and credits, he’s even closer to receiving his degree than she was. “For the security guard part of it, I did it within a year or so, but then with the police officer, you’re going to use more of what Zone 5 has to offer,” she explains, referring to the amount of credits Excelsior accepts from Zone 5 training.

Her degree has opened her eyes to the administrative world of criminal justice. She says it’s helpful that she is able to pull information from her class research to show data that supports various ways of dealing with people who break the rules. Ashley’s favorite courses with the College were CJ 120 Introduction to Corrections and CJ 256 Criminal Justice Administration. CJ 120 helped her understand why it is important to try rehabilitation as an alternative to incarceration and it showed her how biased the social justice system is against low-income persons. CJ 256 gave Ashley many administrative strategies to use in her career.

Ashley says the input from her instructors was instrumental in helping her succeed at Excelsior. “When I asked for help from the professors, they were more than willing to get information, links, or ask questions to help,” she says. Ashley earned an Associate in Science in Criminal Justice in August 2018 and though she isn’t thinking of switching jobs anytime soon, she says her degree will help when she pursues a promotion.

She plans to pursue her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminal justice because, with Excelsior, she found she likes the online format. “My company gives me tuition reimbursement so it makes it more achievable,” she says of pursuing her education. She’s not sure what topic she will pursue; she wants to keep her options open and see how she will best fit with her company, but administration, fire safety, and community policing are on her list. Thanks to her degree from Excelsior and her training from Zone 5, Ashley can keep her options open and pursue higher education and career advancement whenever she pleases.

Herma Lee recalls her mother telling her that she was inclined to help people from an early age. That penchant for helping others makes her an asset as a nurse in the Apheresis Unit at Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York. Her nursing skills, judgment, and interactions with patients and families led to her selection as a 2018 Nurse of the Year in the Capital Region of New York state.

Ten nurses in the region were recognized as part of the Times Union’s Salute to Nurses initiative in May 2018. Each year the newspaper’s readers are invited to nominate a nurse for the award, which honors nursing excellence among more than 273,000 licensed registered nurses in the region. Lee, a nurse at Albany Med for the past 15 years, earned a Master of Science in Nursing from Excelsior College in June 2018. She maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout the program and was inducted into the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing.

In the Apheresis Unit — where whole blood is removed from a patient and components of the whole blood are separated and then a component is removed and the remaining components are returned to the patient — Lee is the experienced educator and mentor to nurses new to the unit. With her years of experience in the unit, she’s at an interesting phase of her career. She enjoys the patient-care aspects of nursing and the reward of seeing patients get better, and revels in helping to educate patients and their families and being a patient advocate. As a level 5 nurse, her next step can be nurse manager, director, or any nurse leadership role. She’s taking the time to identify her niche, as she also enjoys research. “Excelsior did broaden my horizons greatly as to what is out there and what nurses can do,” says Lee.

For the capstone course in the master’s program, she wrote a scholarly paper that discusses educating nurses on vascular access to improve the quality of care for patients receiving therapeutic apheresis. Her paper will be published in 2019 by the American Society of Apheresis, the organization of physicians, scientists, and allied health professionals whose mission is to advance apheresis medicine for patients, donors, and practitioners through education, science-based practice, research, and advocacy.

Nursing was a second career for Lee, who was a dental assistant for 10 years after earning an anthropology degree from the University at Albany. As a single parent to a then 4-year-old, she changed her career trajectory and pursued a nursing degree at Hudson Valley Community College. After working at two local nursing homes, she began working at Albany Med and has spent her entire career there in the same unit.

Lee says that having completed the educational experience at Excelsior, she feels empowered to make a change for the nursing profession and, ultimately, for patients. “I had such a great experience overall, but my most personal and impactful experience was feeling empowered, empowered to represent our nursing profession in this troubled and challenging health care arena,” says Lee, who was recently selected to sit on the hospital’s Institutional Review Board. “I found my voice and grew in confidence to speak on vital changes needed in health care and nursing. I feel like I can do it all. I can change the world.”

Roger Parrino Sr., commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, has always had a sense of service and desire to serve his country. His dedication to public service stems almost 40 years, and throughout his career, he has developed and polished his skills as a leader, analytic thinker, and crisis manager by working hard and, as he puts it, “showing up,” physically and mentally, every day.

When he was a freshman in college, Parrino enlisted with the Marine Corps Reserves during the Iranian hostage crisis. He knew he wanted to serve his country; during a family trip, his father gave him an important piece of advice considering the choice: “We were looking at a war memorial that listed the names of the soldiers that had died in the Civil War and my dad said to me that it is important to serve the country but the objective is to stay off lists like these.”

In 1980, Parrino attended boot camp and then returned to college. Following his fifth semester, he was hired by the New York City Police Department, which was a childhood dream. He says, “I became a narcotics detective and was later promoted to sergeant, supervising a plainclothes anti-crime team, and later became lieutenant commander of detectives and a member of the Hostage Negotiation Team for over 10 years.”

Parrino decided that to advance in his career, he needed to return to school. He always wanted to complete his degree, but it was difficult to balance the different aspects of his life. That’s when he learned that the NYPD helped officers interested in pursuing their education and he heard about Excelsior — then named Regents College. After meeting a Regents recruiter who explained how Regents’ program worked, Parrino knew the college was right for him. The non-traditional learning experience motivated him to go back to school while working as an officer. As a student, Parrino’s biggest challenge was time, but Regents’ flexible structure and helpful advisors helped him achieve his goal of earning a college degree. He graduated in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts.

Parrino retired from the New York City Police Department in 2003. He spent some time with his family before becoming a civilian advisor to the Marine Corps and serving four combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He then served as senior counselor to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson where he worked in counterterrorism, and then in May 2017, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointed Parrino as the commissioner of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

There isn’t a typical day as commissioner, says Parrino, who considers himself a crisis manager. Established in 2010, the Division is comprised of the Offices of Counter Terrorism, Emergency Management, Fire Prevention and Control, Interoperable and Emergency Communications, and Disaster Recovery Programs. Together, these offices coordinate the state’s response with the federal government’s efforts during and after a declared disaster. Parrino believes in having firsthand knowledge when situations arise so that he can best present information to Governor Cuomo. He has two offices — one in Albany, the state capital, and one in New York City — and travels about 40 percent of his time, making sure he is on hand to get the information he needs.

“In the 17 months that I have served as commissioner, we have had some unusual challenges,” says Parrino, describing a rare flooding event that resulted when Lake Ontario’s water level was unusually high. He also notes going to Puerto Rico “to help ensure that donations from New York made it into the communities that needed them the most, which required partnering with local organizations to get the goods out of the port quickly.”

Each day at work presents different situations, says Parrino. He has some good advice, though: “I think the two biggest challenges have been keeping one’s integrity and sense of humor. You need both of those to succeed; if you lose either one, you lose yourself.”