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Wright was 23 when he joined the U.S. Army. He took his first class at UMGC in 1994 in South Korea during his second duty assignment. “A guy came around to all the soldiers and told us about the education benefits. I had been out of school so long that I had to take remedial classes.”

He was single at the time, and the first credit hours accrued quickly until a duty assignment in Germany and the birth of his first child slowed progress. Still, by 1999, during a deployment in Bosnia, he completed his associate degree.

But the busy life of an Army medic—with a decade of deployments and pre-deployment training, plus a marriage, his wife’s career, and four children—made it more and more difficult to persevere with his studies. After transitioning to the private sector as a contract employee working in battlefield forensics, he undertook training and certifications but did not return to a degree program. 

“I did not touch college again for a very long time,” Wright said.

His job as a government contractor has taken him to several countries. From 2004 to 2009, he worked with a group in Iraq assigned to analyze all the documents and digital media generated by the regime of Saddam Hussein. He then worked in Baghdad for two years as a senior mentor to the Iraq Ministry of the Interior to help the set up the new government. 

In 2020, when his last child was old enough to leave home, Wright moved to northern Virginia to work for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in cybersecurity and with DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He thought again about a bachelor’s degree but he was traveling too much to keep up with classes and homework. 

“In the last year, I really said I needed to get this done,” he said. He used credits from his earlier coursework at UMGC and life skills credit for some of his training in the military. 

He expects the bachelor’s degree will open career doors but the master’s degree will be the real ticket to “the next better job.” After that? “I think I’m going to keep going … maybe another master’s degree or a Ph.D.”

Wright said his UMGC courses gave him new tools for his work in digital forensics. He also noted that the Program and Career Exploration (PACE) course, which he thought might be unchallenging—or even boring—since he already had an established career path, “caused me to reflect, to rethink the approach I’d been using.”

Wright, who became a grandfather while finishing up his degree, noted that when he enrolled in his first course, his homework was handwritten or done on a typewriter—far different from the online environment of his most recent semesters. 

He said the pursuit of a degree “is 100 percent worth doing.” 

“For sure it has enhanced my life… If you don’t go to college, your math will not be as good as it could be, your writing skills will not be as good as they should be,” he said. “You learn to think analytically. You are challenged to find reliable sources. You’re not only good at resourcing, you’re good at comprehending.

“I’m a late bloomer,” he added. “I did something that I should have done 30 years ago.”