Military Service Member, Landon Combs: In His Own Words

My story begins in February 2015. I was a general sales manager for a large company. I had been there for two years, when all of the sudden, they made corporate cuts and I was without a job. I had been in the sales industry for 10 years at the time, so I thought, no problem…I can find another job. Well, I spent the next nine months looking for the right fit, and I couldn’t find it. No one wanted to pay me for my experience. They wanted to pay me for a degree that I didn’t have.

All of the job offers I received were well below what I had been earning in the past, and I wasn’t willing to settle. During that time, my wife was teaching full-time, and had started working on her master’s degree, when we found out we were going to have our first child. So here I am unemployed, 35 years old, with my wife killing it and now we are getting ready to add a third person to our household. I didn’t know what to do. My wife has always been an advocate for me finishing my degree, because as she says, “no one can take it away from you.”

[Tweet “I spent the next nine months looking for the right fit, and I couldn’t find it.”]

Since we have a good friend who works in career services at ECPI University, my wife pushed me to talk with them. I went in and met Shawn at the Richmond/Innsbrook campus. He walked me through everything and got me set up to go get it. There was only one problem, I had an interview with a very well-known company for a good job the next day, and the new semester was starting on Monday. I told Shawn I would wait to sign up until I knew.

Well, I went home and thought long and hard, and decided I needed a change for once in my life, so I cancelled the interview and became a full-time business student. I already had a good amount of credits from going to college right after getting out the Marine Corps, so I only needed 18 months to finish if I went full-time, which I did. In fact, as soon as time allowed, I overloaded my classes so I could finish sooner.

[Tweet “I needed a change for once in my life, so I cancelled the interview and became a full-time business student.”]

We had our baby in May, so I went to night classes, and stayed home and raised our daughter for the first eight months of her life. My wife worked all day and I watched the baby, then she came home and I went to class until 11 pm every night. It was hard, but through that process and taking the overloads, I was able to finish my degree in 13 months.

Not only have I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, I graduated Cum Laude with a 3.75 GPA! Now, I am working for the kind of company I have always dreamed about, my wife graduated with her master’s degree, and our daughter just turned one! ECPI University was definitely the best decision I ever made!