Chemical engineering student Jessica Hobbs has two years left in the Army Reserve. Photo by Angela Foster.
Going through life without a degree was out of the question for Jessica Hobbs.
At the start of her college journey, she was a nursing student at Chattanooga State Community College who felt lost when she realized that the profession may not be for her.
Nearly a decade later, Hobbs is nearing graduation from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a degree in chemical engineering. She is also an Innovations in Honors student in the UTC Honors College and the recipient of the Gilman Scholarship, which will allow her to travel to the Netherlands this spring free of charge.
Hobbs would not describe the experience of getting to where she is now as “easy.” For her, it took both mental and physical strength—and doing something she never dreamed of.
“I graduated high school in 2015 and started going to Chattanooga State immediately after. That’s when the HOPE Scholarship came into play, so two free years of college,” said Hobbs, a Signal Mountain High School graduate who hails from Chattanooga.
It wasn’t until she began working in a hospital that she realized that nursing was not for her. It led her to drop out.
“I told myself that if I still didn’t have the money to go back to school after one year, then I needed to do something to go back,” she said. “I wasn’t going to just stop going to college or give up on my degree.”
When the year passed and she still did not have the funds, Hobbs walked into a military recruiting office.
“I told them exactly what I wanted. I said, ‘I’m not going to join unless I can get an enlistment bonus, student loan repayment and all these benefits. I want my college paid for,’” Hobbs recalled.
When they offered her a position, she quickly signed. “I was like, ‘This is going to get me back to school. Beggars can’t be choosers here. It’s going to be hard, but I’m going to get my degree.’”
Hobbs joined the U.S. Army Reserve and was “shipped off for basic training.” When she returned, she reenrolled at ChattState. She got “the call” after only six months.
“They called me and said, ‘Hey, you’re getting deployed,’” she said. “I thought to myself, ‘No,’ because I’d only been back for one semester.”
In the summer of 2021, Hobbs was deployed to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, where she served as a heavy equipment operator. She worked on bulldozers, backhoe scrapers, graders and other heavy machinery.
After her year-long deployment, Hobbs advanced in her role, earning the rank of construction engineering sergeant.
She knew it was time to hit the ground running in her education again. Still, she waited until the beginning of 2023 to enroll at UTC so she could secure a transfer scholarship offered only during the fall semester.
Despite being a “nontraditional” college student, she did not refrain from soaking up the college experience.
“I told myself, ‘I deployed for this degree. We’re going to get the most out of it,’” said Hobbs, who is now often referred to as “Sarge” around the UTC campus. “I joined the Honors College, met with all the professors there and got to know the benefits. I went to the Veteran and Military Affairs office. I got to know all the benefits of being a veteran student.”
Hobbs found out about the Netherlands trip through the College of Engineering and Computer Science. Realizing what a great opportunity it could be, she met with Dr. Trey Straussberger, the director of the Office of National Scholarships, who suggested that she apply for the Gilman.
“The Gilman Scholarship is funded by the United States Department of State,” Straussberger said. “It’s meant to facilitate students who would like to study abroad but otherwise don’t have the funding to do that. It’s a wonderful opportunity for many students here at UTC who otherwise would’ve seen studying abroad as something unattainable.”
At first, Hobbs thought it might be beyond reach.
“Oh man, national scholarship. That’s crazy. How would I get this?” she recalled thinking. “You’re competing against the whole U.S. in order to get this scholarship.”
When she went through the application process, she was in the middle of a 19-credit-hour semester. She got the email that she had won during finals, which she described as “a huge relief.”
“I was like, ‘This is insane,’” she said. “I was not expecting to receive the scholarship.”
As she looks ahead toward her trip to the Netherlands and graduation, Hobbs can reflect on a busy but successful last few years.
On top of schoolwork and attending mandatory Army drills, she has also worked as a nuclear systems and components intern at the Tennessee Valley Authority and as a process technology intern at Olin, a chemical manufacturing plant in Charleston, Tennessee.
Before her internships, she attended a Noncommissioned Officer Academy at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, completing military training and soft skills development in areas such as physical fitness and first aid—as well as public speaking and writing.
Hobbs graduated first in a class of 127 sergeants.
“You’re judged according to how you interact with people, what your leadership style is, how you are as a person, your competencies and attributes,” she said.
These values were put to the test last summer when she went on a trip to Scandinavia with the Honors College, which Straussberger also attended.
“She was more like a chaperone than another student,” he said. “I think that comes from her background of being in the military and a noncommissioned officer, but also due to her kind of determination and responsibility.”
Hobbs laughed as she recalled helping the younger students avoid cars and bikes in the cobblestone streets, allowing her “sergeant” to come out.
“I reached my arm out, grabbed him by the jacket and literally yanked him out of the road,” she said about one student who was almost run over. “Because I was still doing my weightlifting, I was pretty dang strong at this point.”
She is still maintaining her fitness, as she has two years left of inactive duty in the reserve before she is discharged.
As for the future, Hobbs said she doesn’t have any “extravagant plans.” To her, success means graduating, advancing in her chemical engineering career and being financially stable—something her military experience helped with.
“I look back on the moment that I was signing my paperwork,” she said. “I was very determined to get my degree and I wasn’t going to stay a college dropout forever.
“I would probably do it all over again just because I’m where I’m at now because I did it. I learned things in the Army, too. I learned what it means to have a routine, stay disciplined and to really push hard when you want something.”
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