Just Right

A doctoral student at Harvard. A wellness counselor. A social studies teacher. A professional dancer and instructor. An assistant director at a shelter for homeless women and children. A director of clinical development for a gene therapy program. A devoted science fiction reader and writer. An NBA team’s physical therapist and wellness lead.  

These are a few of the hundreds of people who have turned to the College of Liberal & Professional Studies (LPS) certificate program to learn something new, advance their careers, or follow a dream. 

“Our mission includes making a Penn Arts & Sciences education accessible to different types of learners, both through availability and affordability,” says Nora E. Lewis, Vice Dean for Professional and Liberal Education. “And part of the LPS DNA is innovation in pedagogical design and delivery. Honestly, being able to offer certificates, and especially online certificates, was kind of out there for a traditional Ivy League university. It’s a very different way of thinking about education.” 

Starting in 2015, as LPS researched and designed its all-online Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences, the staff and faculty also saw a need for focused programs for people who wanted to learn about a specific area but didn’t need a full degree. Drawing on research of best practices in adult and online learning and the expertise of Penn’s faculty, along with 130 years of experience working with adult learners, LPS launched the certificate program in 2018. There was immediate interest, which ratcheted up even more during the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant turn to virtual education. 

For some, it’s the start of a path to a degree, a way of getting their feet wet. Others want to learn about a specific topic, for professional or personal reasons. “We survey students on what they want to achieve,” says Tomea Knight, LPS senior director of strategic marketing and outreach. “It can differ from program to program. But many are trying to quickly train while working or managing other responsibilities, and they can use what they’re learning right away.” 

The number of certificates available and classes offered has continued to grow, based on feedback from students and input from employers, along with new topics of interest that develop. “The students make it so clear what we need. They keep us on our toes,” says Jaime Kelly, director of certificate and non-degree programs. 

For most standalone certificates, students complete four courses online, usually a combination of required and optional classes. They’re taught mostly asynchronously, which lets students—most of whom have other responsibilities—do the work when they have time. Each course is eight weeks, and a certificate can be completed in a year. Despite being online and coming from all over the world, students truly connect with each other and the faculty, says Knight. “There’s such diversity,” she adds. “It’s the most exciting thing.”

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Kelley Roark 

After years of curiosity and independent study, Kelley Roark was finally about to start her college education. She discovered, though, that her non-traditional path would present challenges to completing a neuroscience minor within the necessary timeframe. 

Unaddressed health issues had made high school difficult for Roark. But when medical intervention radically improved her life, she was inspired to become a medical assistant. She saw patients with complex medical histories, and soon found she was “curious about the molecular, biological, and neurological underpinnings of these issues.” To learn more, she started reading academic papers and came across the molecular target of rapamycin (mTOR) and its broad applicability to chronic diseases of aging, neurodevelopment, and epilepsy. 

In 2019, Roark enrolled at the University of Maryland to study public health and take some premed courses to learn more about mTOR. She also joined the kinesiology lab of Associate Professor Sushant Ranadive, a position she maintained during the pandemic, and which helped her decide to pursue translational research in neuroscience. Timing, prerequisites, and affordability, however, made it difficult to take the classes she wanted. “These barriers just kept coming up,” she recalls. 

She was also dealing with a personal crisis that increased her time pressure but continued to look for a way to pursue her education. She saw an ad for LPS on Facebook and applied to the Certificate in Neuroscience program, which she began in the summer of 2022. “That has made all the difference,” she says. 

LPS helped Roark align her certificate classes with her bachelor’s studies and also provided resources for the personal challenges she faced, even helping her arrange her schedule and fit in an extra philosophy class to accommodate her need to graduate quickly. 

Roark says the Penn program also provided her with a sense of belonging. “I just wasn’t able to fit in all the in-person classes I wanted and would have had to wait a year to access some again,” she says. “The LPS classes were very dense and challenging, but convenient for the non-traditional student. I immediately felt like I was in the right place.” She found colleagues and mentors within and outside of Penn. With their encouragement, she published a paper and reached out to Philip Iffland, a researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who is studying mTOR. 

Roark is now a lab technician in Iffland’s translational research lab and is applying to Ph.D. programs. She’s finally researching the molecular aspects of neurological disorders that have long fascinated her. She’s presented research at the American Epilepsy Society and is currently working on an original research article with Iffland. 

“If you have an idea and you think it’s important enough,” she says, “that can motivate you to get you where you need to go, even in dire circumstances.”

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Robert Marshall 

In 2003, two years into college, Robert Marshall joined the Army, spurred by the 9/11 attacks. After serving in Iraq, he completed his degree in history and pre-law and then reenlisted, ultimately serving 10 years as an infantry officer. 

“When I left the military I had, I would say, a pretty difficult transition,” Marshall says. To cope and heal, he discovered mindfulness and then positive psychology, which led him to Penn, where the field was developed. “Now that I had some equilibrium, I was trying to figure out, what did I want to do?” he says. “Loving positive psychology, I wanted to do the graduate program, but I wasn’t ready for that level. So, when the certificate program became available it was great to kind of dip my toes in.” 

He enrolled in 2019, and from the first, Marshall says, “I loved it. I really excelled in it. I love the structure of it. I love the virtual. It allowed me to get back into the academic framework and not be overwhelmed, but still challenged. And it was also subjects I was interested in, so it was exciting.” He was also more motivated and disciplined than he’d been as a college student. “When you’re an undergrad you’re young. You don’t know who you are or how you work, so coming back, it was easier for me. I had more life experience; I knew how I function as a person.” It even got him through the math, a subject he’d struggled with earlier. 

Collaborating closely with his peers helped him develop more cooperative practices as a self-employed entrepreneur. “It gave me the tools to reach out for support in a safe way when I feel apprehensive about asking for help. As a veteran, I felt that I could really speak about my experience and feel heard and supported,” he says. 

Marshall is now in Montana, where he’s begun a business making men’s grooming products and is enjoying working with his hands and creating something. He also has a wellness company called Flourishing Man that combines nature with positive psychology, and he plans to come back to Penn to earn a master’s degree in positive psychology and continue his work to help male veterans and other men. 

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Nile Miller 

After Nile Miller earned his master’s degree in international relations, he applied for a fellowship in Penn’s Office of Global Initiatives. He saw that working with data was part of the position description, and figured he could learn how to do that. He got the fellowship and became more and more interested in the possibilities of data to help visualize facts and statistics and to tell a story. “I developed an interactive map that showed where Penn researchers and students were working,” he remembers. 

His interest continued to grow after he moved to the International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) office at Penn, and when the Certificate in Data Analytics became available, he decided it was a good place to begin. He enrolled in 2021. “I thought I should start with something smaller to get a taste of what it’s like to study and work at the same time,” says Miller. “It was an opportunity to get my hands onto some actual coding. And I also thought it might be useful for my job.” 

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Miller did find that for his ISSS work, he was drawing on the skills he was learning in his certificate classes. “There were a lot of laws and all sorts of measures being passed that related to international students. So, our office had to do a lot of persuading and working with government stakeholders,” he says. “It was really important to have accurate data and be able to tell those stories.” 

LPS launched the certificate program in 2018. There was immediate interest, which ratcheted up even more during the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant turn to virtual education. 

The program covered both tools and the analytical side, says Miller, like understanding the appropriate method of visualization for particular data types, the fundamentals of the R programming language, and “how to create a chart that is accurate and isn’t misleading.” He appreciated the community he found. “There’s a lot of material and you have to study and do all the readings and the problem sets. So, having a group of people to struggle through that with was really useful. We were able to not just talk through the tech stuff but, I guess, commiserate a little.” 

Miller also took advantage of other opportunities at Penn, like participating in a day-long hackathon held by the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies. He became involved with a nonprofit called LaunchCode, a coding boot camp with a diverse cohort, and started thinking seriously about a career pivot. 

He posted his final project—an interactive data browser about public school quality in Pennsylvania—online to see what reaction it might get. The head of Tech Impact’s Data Innovation Lab reached out to offer him a fellowship. 

Miller is now working full-time at Advanced Technology Services Group and is hoping to do projects on the side related to social impact issues like food security. “Data doesn’t speak for itself,” he says. “Data analytics is a very technical field, but it involves a lot of thinking about the humans behind the numbers, how to best visualize the data and make an impact.”

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Katie Shelburn 

Katie Shelburn started in real estate in high school, working at the desk of a local firm. She continued in the field as she earned her bachelor’s of science in human performance management and afterward, eventually worked in operations, sales, and leadership for different firms. But even as she advanced and moved around in her field, she was realizing she’d left something behind. 

“I’d spent so much time focusing on building skills in real estate and business management, but my passion is really writing,” says Shelburn. “That’s what I was always enthusiastic about. I wanted to tilt my career in a direction that would involve more writing.” 

Part of the LPS DNA is innovation in pedagogical design and delivery. Honestly, being able to offer certificates, and especially online certificates, was kind of out there for a traditional Ivy League university. It’s a very different way of thinking about education.

She looked for a certificate program because she wanted “training wheels for getting back into school, especially studying something new while I was working.” She googled Penn because it was local, and she liked that the LPS classes were virtual and self-paced. 

Shelburn enrolled in the Certificate in Professional Writing in March 2023. She got up to speed quickly and found setting her own schedule worked well as she balanced school, work, and life, and then later when she decided to transition into freelance writing. She was also able to immediately use what she was learning, both as a full-time real estate employee and then in her “side hustle that I eventually took full time.” 

Shelburn’s favorite class turned out to be the required first course, Fundamentals of Professional Writing. “It really covered proper analysis and critical thinking, and there was also a poetic reasoning section that complemented that focus from a creative perspective. It helped me approach problem-solving in a new way,” she says. “I got great value out of that course, which took me through the rest of the program. And I liked that you could customize other classes. I knew the niche that I was going into and what areas I needed to study.”

In contrast with other programs she’d taken, she “found all of the content useful,” she says. She also was able to connect with instructors outside of class. “Because I was starting something new, I wanted to meet as many people as I could who were involved in writing, just to talk about different resources, local places where I could meet other freelance writers,” she says. “They were super supportive. It really helped me transition into that new industry.”