TAYLOR CHAPMAN

When she joined the staff of Duke Primary Care’s Heritage Pediatrics clinic in September of 2022, Taylor Chapman, a Clinical Nurse II, had been chipping away at a bachelor’s degree in nursing for more than a year. The degree would enable her to advance in nursing, potentially becoming a Clinical Nurse IV, and leading and mentoring a team.

She’d been paying her own way through the program at UNC Wilmington, taking one class at a time. When she started at Duke, she had four classes left. But without help, it would take another year to pay for them herself.

To make the employee tuition assistance program more accessible to new employees, such as Chapman, Duke reduced the eligibility waiting period from two years to six months. The move allowed Chapman to use the benefit to cover the costs of a final few classes. She will get her degree in December from UNC Wilmington, the most popular educational destination for Duke employees using the tuition benefit in 2021-22.

“This allows me to move the whole timeline up, which helps me a whole lot,” she said. “This just shows that Duke wants its nurses to be well-educated, and it’s willing to help them with that process.”

Jason Raper

RADIOLOGIC

Starting this fall, Jason Raper’s schedule will be packed. He’ll have work shifts at Duke Raleigh Hospital, playground trips with his daughter Camila Grace and, after enrolling at Boise State University, plenty of college coursework.

“I hope this won’t be too insane,” said Raper, a radiologic technologist who has worked at Duke since 2015.

As he’s grown more comfortable in his role, and at Duke, Raper has explored opportunities to take on more responsibilities and new leadership challenges. And to do that, Raper, who earned an associate degree several years ago, saw an applied sciences bachelor’s degree as a solid foundation for his next career step at Duke. But when he looked at the degree programs in North Carolina, he felt they weren’t perfect fits.

Earlier this year, when Duke adjusted its employee tuition assistance benefit to allow any accredited institution in the U.S., things changed. Now able to search nationwide, Raper found Boise State’s online applied sciences bachelor’s degree program, which had the courses, price, and schedule to fit his already busy life.

“With Boise State, everything just kind of fell into place,” Raper said.

>>> continued on page 6

Cheryl Bock

SHARED RESOURCE MANAGER, DUKE CANCER CENTER

After working in Duke labs for 39 years, Cheryl Bock knows her way around science. But as she goes about overseeing one of the research operations of the Duke Cancer Center, she often leans on skills she strengthened while learning about subjects that have little to do with science.

In 2001, Bock began the master’s degree program in Duke Graduate Liberal Studies. The flexible, self-designed program allowed Bock to sharpen her research and writing skills, while chasing her curiosity about a range of subjects. During her four years in the program, she spent time in England studying poetry, ventured to France to learn about the architecture of cathedrals, and wrote her thesis on formerly enslaved people who lived on South Carolina’s barrier islands.

“It was a lot of work, but I got a lot of value out of it,” said Bock, who used the tuition benefit to help pay for the degree, which she earned in 2005.

While it’s been nearly two decades since she finished the program, the experience is rarely far from her mind.

“This was about life enhancement and personal growth,” Bock said. “But the techniques I used writing papers and doing research are things I still use today.”