"CCM professors and staff put a lot of effort into helping their students succeed."
Major: Chemistry
Class of 2017
John Walters, ’17, started out studying welding in high school. Now, he will be attending New Jersey Medical School to complete his MD and pursue a career in emergency medicine. County College of Morris (CCM) helped him make the pivotal switch.
As a child, Walters was interested in the medical field. He would often play doctor and read about the human body. That interest, however, dwindled when he entered high school.
“I was distracted and uninterested in learning,” Walters says. He decided to specialize in welding in high school because his father was a carpenter. “I thought I would study something similar to what my dad did.”
When he took a chemistry course his junior year in high school, it changed his academic trajectory. “It was the first course I was interested in,” he says. “But I needed to complete my specialty in welding. I had plans to get an internship after graduation, but there were a lot of questions about the profession that I had.”
After a friend recommended he take a look at CCM, he enrolled as a chemistry student following his high school graduation.
“CCM gave me the confidence to pursue such a rigorous course of study,” he says. “I needed to work with my mind just as hard as I would work with my hands.”
After earning his associate degree, he completed a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at Montclair State University. At New Jersey Medical School, he plans to earn his medical degree so he can pursue his dream of becoming an emergency room physician. “I’m interested in the wide breadth of patient populations you find in an emergency room,” he says.
He credits his success to the help he found at CCM. “CCM professors and staff put a lot of time and effort into helping their students,” says Walters.
As a CCM student, he took advantage of many of the student support services, including Transfer Services.
“CCM does an excellent job making the transfer process as easy as possible,” he says. “They made me aware of NJ Transfer and how I could utilize it.” That service assists community colleges students with transferring their college credits to a four-year state institution.
“I would 100 percent recommend CCM,” Walters says. “It’s much more than a community college.”