As Elena Fetters ’23, ’24 intently listened to a variety of speakers and saw different careers in the field through her classes at Bowling Green State University, she experienced a completely new side of criminal justice.

The field was much broader than she initially knew when she picked the major out of high school, and the experience led her to make a key decision while she was still an undergraduate.

With her mind set on a new pathway, Fetters jumped on the fast track to a Master of Science in Criminal Justice and completed the program at age 21.

“I think this program does a really good job of broadening perspectives and helping students see there are more than just a couple of careers in criminal justice,” Fetters said. “Especially in the learning community classes, they bring in a lot of speakers who are experts in some of these criminal justice fields.

“They did a lot to make sure you got to hear from a lot of different people, and that’s really built into the curriculum.”

For Fetters, the chance to see a variety of criminal justice careers up close through her courses in the criminal justice learning community allowed her to make an important discovery at a young age: she didn’t want to be on her original path.

Like many prospective students who choose criminal justice, Fetters initially wanted to be a crime scene investigator.

When presented with all the career options a criminal justice degree provides, however, Fetters said what she was really interested in was a different aspect of the field as a criminal intelligence analyst.

“I realized through that I really liked the social science of criminal justice,” she said. “I’m a big science person, so when I got the opportunity to shadow a criminal justice analyst, I thought, ‘Well, this is more what I want to do.’”

With the help of her advisor, associate teaching professor and criminal justice learning community director Catherine Pape, Fetters used college credits obtained in high school plus the accelerated option at BGSU to pursue her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the same time.

Pape said the reason criminal justice courses expose students to so many careers in their first year is to encourage them to think about the full range of paths they can take as professionals.

The experiences naturally confirm a student’s initial career goal or, like Fetters, help them find one to which they might be better suited.

“Elena came in like a lot of our new students with similar interests, but for me, it’s great to see those light-bulb moments where a speaker comes in, or we have an experience, or they learn about something that they never knew existed,” Pape said. “They can explore those paths, and what’s fun for me is to connect them with people in the field who can help them.”

Fetters was then able to apply the change in her academic path to her internship experience at the Ohio Domestic Violence Network, which confirmed a fulfilling way for her to use her criminal justice degrees.

After seeing a different aspect of the field, Fetters said she saw an important way the system operates.

“I liked the behind-the-scenes work, and when I sought out my internship, I wanted to solidify an experience that grounded me in seeing who was actually being affected by the criminal justice system,” Fetters said. “Getting to hear from victims, listening in on calls about victims and seeing the resources available to them, I don't think I'll ever lose sight of what's really important when working in this field."

Pape said Fetters deserves a great deal of credit for being a motivated student who slightly altered the original plan and then tested the idea with an internship.

Once Fetters knew how she fit into the field, Pape said the sky was the limit.

“She just needed me to help her organize her classes in a way that accelerated her master’s degree, and she was able to overlap three graduate classes while she was still an undergraduate,” Pape said. “She was able to identify her goals and put a plan into place into how she could reach them, and now here she is.”