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Early college student more than ready for next chapter

BLOOMSBURG, Pa. (06/25/2025) — "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."

It's a quote Carly Dye first saw in fourth grade - a message she has since lived by and one she plans to proudly display in her own classroom someday. With her high school diploma now in hand, the newly minted Milton Area High School graduate is set to embark on the next stage of her teaching journey.

College.

"I've always kind of known I wanted to be a teacher," said Dye, an incoming early childhood and special education major at Commonwealth University-Bloomsburg. "I think back to fourth grade when I had a really good teacher. I just enjoyed Mr. (Michael) Underkoffler's classroom so much. I wanted to help him with everything and that's when I kind of realized, maybe teaching is for me."

Underkoffler's classroom message has long stuck with her.

"We would say it every day," Dye said. "He would run his classroom around that quote. It's something I can definitely see myself doing when I'm a teacher."

In fact, Dye has envisioned being a teacher for quite some time and began her teaching preparation and college transition well before walking the graduation stage this spring. Dye spent her senior year at Milton dually enrolled in CU's Early College program, and now she's one of 180 early college students starting this fall as a full-time CU student.

"It's definitely nice going into my freshman year already having college credits and knowing the campus a little bit," Dye said. "I got to meet a lot of the professors I'll be having already, which makes it a little less scary because at least I'll know my teachers even if I don't know the other students."

Another advantage Dye will have this fall after already completing seven college courses, including one core major class, is scheduling. Taking care of her general education requirements early will enable Dye to get into her major education coursework sooner than later - and eventually lead to her earning her bachelor's degree in three years instead of four.

"I've already taken Technology for Individuals with Exceptionalities with Professor (Walter) Zilz," Dye said. "It was pretty cool. We learned how to make websites and different assistive technology tools to use when teaching. It was definitely my favorite class so far."

Through Milton's early childhood education program Dye also got an abundance of in-the-classroom experience during her senior year while she took classes at Bloomsburg. The teacher shadowing, notably at James F. Baugher Elementary, gave Dye exposure to lesson plans, behavioral management, large group instruction, as well as opened her eyes to special education.

"I got to work with adaptive gym students during my high school gym class, and I just loved working with them," Dye said. "It made me want to add special education to my early childhood component."

Her work with Lindsay Bauer's first grade classroom proved even more beneficial.

"It definitely helped me realize not every kid learns the same, so different things help different students," Dye said. "I was able to actually work on my own lesson plans. And then we had a substitute teacher one day, so that was an opportunity where Miss Bauer actually wrote in the lesson plan to do the activity with me. I had a book that I did with them, and then an activity or two to go along with it. That was pretty cool."

From that yearlong elementary experience, Dye leveraged her early college opportunity to conduct research into how learning environments affected learning. She presented her findings this spring at Bloomsburg during the Frederick Douglass Institute for Academic Excellence's annual Topics That Matter poster session - further adding to her teaching resume before she begins her first full-time semester of college.

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