When Jeannine Morber first started taking classes at Carroll Community College more than 10 years ago, she didn't put any pressure on herself to finish her degree.
If she didn't like the classes, she wasn't going to keep attending the school. But that isn't what happened.
"I really enjoyed it," she said. "I always had such a good experience there."
Morber, a 2004 graduate of Carroll Community College, is one of several notable alumni the college has seen in its 20-year existence as an independent college, according to college President Faye Pappalardo. Other prominent alumni include Del. Justin Ready, R-District 5A, and Roger Voter, owner of Save Point, a gaming center in Westminster.
Several alumni, including Morber, attribute much of their professional success to what they learned and the connections they made at Carroll Community.
Morber, of Taneytown, was in her early 40s when she decided to go back to school. After her husband retired from the Navy, they moved to Carroll County from Virginia Beach, where she worked in retail management.
"I really just didn't want to go back into sales again," she said.
So she enrolled in classes at Carroll because it was close by and affordable, and ended up leaving the school with a 4.0 grade point average and the President's Academic Excellence Award. During her time there, her professors made her fall in love with math again, she said.
Morber went on to Hood College to earn a bachelor's degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics. Because of Carroll, she felt well prepared for her academic course load, Morber said. Now she owns her own marketing company, Morber Marketing Group.
Morber Marketing Group is a company dedicated to helping businesses integrate new technologies into their marketing processes.
"I always attribute Carroll Community to starting me on this new career [path] and exciting life," she said.
Morber now is working on earning her master's in business administration from Hood College. She plans to retire in about 10 years and she hopes to be able to teach credit classes at Carroll at that time.
"That's why I have one cause that I promote and I support, and that's Carroll Community College," she said.
Since graduating from Carroll Community in 2010, another alumnus, Roger Voter, also now owns his own business.
Voter decided to attend Carroll Community because of its affordability and because he heard about all the career opportunities and internships the school provided its students.
Through a connection with his economics professor, he got an internship in 2009 at the Westminster office of Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, former U.S. Representative for Maryland's sixth congressional district. He interned with NASA in summer 2010.
After attending Carroll, Voter transferred to Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, where he graduated in 2012.
"Carroll Community College is a great stepping stone to starting whatever you want to do in life," he said.
In 2011, when still in college, Voter opened Save Point with a friend. The store is a multipurpose gaming center in TownMall of Westminster.
He has since started International Medical Aid, which is a nonprofit that travels to developing countries and implements mobile health-care clinics. The goal is to improve people's access to medicine in developing countries.
One graduate took advantage of a field trip opportunity offered by Carroll Community College that ultimately had an influence on his career choice. Maryland Del. Justin Ready, a 2002 graduate, went with his fellow Carroll students to student advocacy day in Annapolis one year. College officials go each year and take students in an effort to advocate for community college funding.
Carroll Community offered Ready his first trip to the Maryland General Assembly.
"I got to meet our legislators and see what Annapolis was all about," he said.
At Carroll, Ready liked the fact that he never felt like he was just a number. He got to know faculty members and classmates and learned so much in his classes, he said.
Ready went to Carroll largely for financial reasons and it gave him the opportunity to get out of college debt-free, he said. He graduated from Salisbury University in 2004.
"Community college offered a great opportunity to try a number of things," he said.
Carroll Community also offered him a flexible class schedule so he could work and maintain a full course load. The college even hired him in the maintenance department for a summer after he graduated so he could save up money to attend Salisbury.
Ready was the college's 2012 commencement speaker. The college has experienced so much growth and the student life is much more active than it was when he went to Carroll, he said.
The only problem he sees the school facing in future years is being able to accommodate increased attendance.
"It's come such a long way in 20 years and obviously the future is so bright," he said.
