Erika Hale

Erika Hale graduated from high school at the age of 16 and attended a few semesters at Illinois Central, where she studied criminal justice.  “Honestly, I just wasn’t mature enough for college yet and just gave up on it,” she says.  “I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

Hale moved to Tennessee in 2008, following her parents, who had moved back to her father’s hometown of Elizabethton the year before, and decided she wanted to complete her college education.  By that time, though, the Gray resident had three children and did not think she could make the commitment to a traditional college or university.  So she enrolled in online courses through the University of Phoenix and earned her associate degree in elementary education.  And she still didn’t know what she wanted to do.

“I began substituting in an elementary school and realized very quickly, ‘This is not what I want to do!’  But I felt like I still wanted to teach,” she said.  “I substituted at a high school, and absolutely fell in love with those children.”

With that knowledge and her lifetime love of math and “knack for numbers,” Hale knew she needed to return once again to school.  “You can’t do math online, at an online school – you just can’t.  ETSU was close to home, so I began working on my math degree here.”

Like many adult, nontraditional students, Hale, now age 31, finds balancing the demands of school with other areas of her life very challenging.  She and her husband, Brad, a Wellmont Health Systems executive and adjunct faculty member in ETSU’s College of Business and Technology, are the parents of two daughters, ages 7 and 8, and an 11-year-old son.  They are active members of Colonial Heights Christian Church, where she teaches a children’s Sunday school class and a women’s Bible study, and she is employed by Lifeway Christian Store.

While she loves her life, Hale admits to occasionally finding herself a bit envious of younger students who do not yet have as many time commitments as she does.  “I understand some of them still have to juggle work and school … but I am juggling work, and school, and home, and children, and I’m envious,” she said, adding that finding time to study and do the work required for her classes is the hardest thing for her.  “Sometimes it’s more than I can take, and I have to remember, ‘one day at a time.’

“There is absolutely no way to make this work without organizing and delegating every minute of your time every single day,” she continued.  “We have a dry erase calendar on the fridge that says where everybody is supposed to be every minute of every day.”

Hale finds support and community with others in the same situation through Alpha Sigma Lambda.  This honor society for adult students, which she serves as a board member, frequently hosts special events for students with children, including family movie nights and “Giggles and Glee” weekends, and also reaches out to the community by “adopting” children from the Salvation Army Angel Tree and taking up collections of needed items for veterans.  In addition, she serves on the Sherrod Library Student Advisory Board and is a member of Kappa Mu Epsilon honor society for math students, the Abstract Algebra Club and the Math Students Society.

Hale, who is minoring in secondary education, aims to complete the requirements for her math major in the spring of 2016 before entering her teaching residency in the 2016-17 academic year.  In the spring, she hopes to do her undergraduate research project on the feasibility of getting Raspberry Pi – low-cost, credit card-sized computers that can do everything regular computers can do – into local schools to enhance computer science education.  After she graduates in 2017, becoming the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree, she plans to go to graduate school, then pursue employment in a local school system.

And if, for some reason, she decides teaching at the high school level isn’t what she wants to do, she’s got that covered.  “I like having a major in math versus a major in education,” she said.  “If I decide I don’t want to teach, a major in math gives me a lot of options.”

In the video clip below, Erika Hale shares her appreciation of the diversity among the people of East Tennessee State University and how one student organization helped her to feel like she belonged.