Leah Holloway

"I had a really great experience and felt the class content was appropriate for the course with good instructor feedback and response time. I would highly recommend it!"

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Leah Holloway worked as a registered dietitian in a northern California hospital for 10 years and was finally ready to move forward. She applied to a physician’s assistant school but hit a barrier. She needed to complete a college English course before she could get started.

“Some [PA schools] require that you have an English composition credit,” Holloway said. “I took AP English in high school, so I never took a college course.”

Holloway could have applied to a face-to-face college—with its fees, paperwork and inflexible semester structure—but she chose a different route. An Internet search brought her to the University of Arkansas’ Self-Paced Online Courses webpage, where she found a class that would transfer.

“I had a really great experience and felt the class content was appropriate for the course with good instructor feedback and response time,” Holloway said. “I would highly recommend it!”

Holloway started the class within two weeks. She studied at her own pace, without reorganizing her life to fit inside a semester-based system. This flexibility made it much easier to manage the demands of work and family.

“There weren’t certain deadlines except for the course completion,” Holloway said. “I was able to complete it, do a bunch of things at once if I needed to and then maybe wait a week and then do some more things instead of having to go to a scheduled class.”

An additional incentive was the cost, which Holloway said was, “a lot cheaper than some of the other places that I saw.”

Holloway completed her coursework within about 18 weeks. Now she has the prerequisite she needs to apply for physician’s assistant school.