Because Jay entered the Army in June 1967, his 30 year mandatory retirement date would have been June 1997. But that would have meant one of two things. Either the family would remain in the area and Anne would graduate from Menchville High School, or Jay would find a job in some other area, and Anne would arrive in a new school only for her senior year. So Jay elected retire in August 1996 with 29 years and two months of service, giving Anne the opportunity to spend both her junior and senior years at the same high school.

Jay saw a search for The Director of Professional Development Programs at Florida State University's Center for Professional Development (CPD). Seemed interesting, but what the job entailed it wasn't clear. He called his potential boss, to ask for a job description and got a very bureaucratic answer. Something like, "At these higher levels of academic management the duties and responsibilities are so broad that it is really not possible to construct such a document." Jay delivered his thanks while wondering how the poor Army had managed to develop a pretty specific job description for when he commanded a 3,000 man forward deployed combat engineer brigade in Europe. Oh, well.

Now what? So Jay drafted his own job description, thinking that the Director of Professional Education was the person who helped the university professors with their professional studies. Wrong! He did not learn till later that this was a position in the university's continuing education department that delivered non-credit certification programs and similar professional education programs to the community. But the large bound job application package worked, and he was offered a job interview. So Jay and Bonnie flew to Tallahassee and there Jay learned that the workforce already at CPD all had concerns about Jay being a retired Army Colonel and doing nothing but sitting back and issuing orders. At the interview, Jay assured him that he was a hands-on type person, and that just before departing for Florida he was in the process of cutting and pasting some documents that needed to go out to his command. He asked them to call his secretaries to verify this - and they did! Well, Jay got hired.

Soon after Jay learned that he had been employed by Florida State University, he and Bonnie made a trip to Tallahassee for house hunting. They found a good realtor who showed them around for a couple of days, and they found a very nice home in a community north of and about 20 to 25 minutes travel time to FSU. The community was called Ox Bottom Manor. And so Jay was on his way to becoming an FSU staff member.

The move from Fort Eustis to Tallahassee was reasonably smooth. The Braden caravan, Piglett and all, made it uneventfully, if a bit slowly. The movers arrived the next day and Bonnie began settling into her new home, something she was very used to.

Interestingly, after about five days on the job Jay looked up from his office to find one of the CPD employees standing outside, looking at him. Jay asked something like, "What's up?" He learned that he was not performing at all according to expectations; that he was - in fact - a hands-on person who was willing to get down in the trenches to learn the business and help his subordinates.

In Tallahassee Robert and Anne would go to the very well regarded the Leon High School. Robert played soccer there for his freshman year and played varsity tennis for his junior and senior years. He was active in the Leon High School Band for most of his freshman year, and he played in recreational leagues for soccer and baseball. Jay helped coach most of Robert's soccer teams, and many of Robert's friends were on these teams. We had fun practices and enjoyed our games very much. Anne played varsity softball for Leon High School and did well. In November of 1996 Sandra married Steve Roberts and their home was in Brandon. The wedding was a very nice affair and they began house hunting, ultimately finding a good buy in a small community near the intersection of Lumsden Road and St Cloud Avenue in Valrico.

Jay and Bonnie enjoyed the university atmosphere. The whole family had season tickets for the football games. Anne lived in a dorm on campus and later became a member and ultimately the vice president of the Phi Mu sorority, and did very well with her responsibilities there. She enjoyed being with her sorority sisters. The Braden family enjoyed Tallahassee. Jay and Bonnie had a pool and a pool screen added onto their home. They purchased a jet ski and used it on a nearby lake. Tallahassee was also a reasonably two hour drive to Panama City Beach, a three and a half hour drive to visit Robert when he began attending Georgia Tech, and not that far from a six mile skate path along an abandoned railroad trail that led to the small village of St Marks on the St Marks River that ultimately fed Apalachee Bay, a small part of the Gulf of Mexico, At St Marks we would buy lunch or some snacks and then head back. A nice benefit of working for FSU was that Jay, as a staff member, got to use university facilities and he played racquetball at their very nice student Rec Center with its excellent courts on a regular basis. Even better was a community Rec Center not far from their Meadow Ridge home. It also had a racquetball court that Jay used occasionally.

The Dean of Continuing Education was Robert Simerly, a great man and an author of many books on continuing education. Dr. Simerly met often with his staff to help them understand the continuing education process and how they might better perform in their various capacities. CPD provide program Administrators (course assistants) for both graduate course that students take towards earning a graduate degree and non=credit continuing education programs that persons take to earn professional certifications (as with Microsoft) or simply for professional development, as in an Effective Writing course. Each of those programs had its special challenges.

• Graduate programs on campus are administered by staff members at the College of Business. But Colleges of Business often have an Executive Management program that is noncredit, but targeted towards people already in business who want the university's Executive Management credential (normally earned in 12-15 months) and not necessarily a graduate degree which normally takes years to complete. Administering an Executive Management program requires recruiting qualified students, setting up classes to sometimes include class snacks and class outings, providing administrative assistance to the faculty (a pretty large task in itself), setting up faculty pay for this extra teaching effort, helping get student questions answered, and being the "Go To" person for about anything that needs to get done for the class short of teaching it. An Executive Management program is a College of Business profit center.
• Continuing education programs are one of a university's profit centers. Persons developing and delivering these programs are expected to generate sufficient income to cover their salaries, to cover all program expenses (teacher salaries, books and supplies, advertising, snacks if offered), and to provide about 35% of their net profits back to the university. Most programs involve finding a curriculum or generating one; something that a Program Administrator for university graduate programs doesn't worry about: the graduate curriculum is provided by the university and the texts are specified by the instructors. Continuing education staff members also perform all the "other" tasks that Program Administrators do for graduate programs plus they do their own bookkeeping and their own recruiting of teachers as well as students.

One of the finest people Jay met while at CPD was Lori McCall. Jay does not remember exactly how Lori came to the Center, but when she did she assumed the responsibility for a very successful program that CPD had in delivering the course education required to earn the Certified Financial Planner^TM (CFP) designation. We could do this because FSU was "licensed" by the CFP Board as a curriculum provider. At the time we were delivering the program in classes at the Turnbull Center, home of CPD, using instructors from FSU's College of Business. We had also been dabbling in converting the course material for online delivery, something pretty new at the time. Lori jumped in and took FSU's CFP Program to new levels! Jay believes that while Lori worked for CPD, her salary was paid by the College of Business. Two things Jay learned about Lori.

1. She only had one method of operating, and that was full speed ahead. She tackled projects with boundless enthusiasm and energy, and with a degree of confidence that was truly inspirational to others, and
2. When you became Lori's friend, you are friend for life. Jay still gets birthday cards from her every year and Jay left FSU in 2001!

Not long after starting at FSU and with the encouragement of Dr. Simerly, Jay began his doctoral program in the College of Education seeking an Ed.D. His major professor was Dr. Beverly Bowers. It turned out that for FSU, staff members were allowed to take up to six credit hours per semester without charge. So Jay's only costs were books, and they were more than adequately covered by Jay’s G.I. Bill entitlement funds. The classes tended to be lots of group discussions, and Jay often was appointed to be the record keeper, probably based on his engineering background and ability to pick out salient points in any discussion. Jay got along well with his classmates and enjoyed the program, which generally required two evenings a week. Jay completed his credit hour course work in December 1995 and began work on his dissertation. He had learned something that many doctoral students do not realize: that the dissertation is more of a learning exercise than an endeavor in academic research. The key is to generate a hypothesis that requires research just on the border of all previous research in the particular area, and to keep the focus of the dissertation very, very narrow. One wants to stay close to previous research because that provides the basis for the biographical studies that form the foundation for what one is trying to accomplish. There are many areas of interest that a doctoral student may want to pursue, but these are in areas where previously documented and verified research is absent. If a doctoral student has his or her heart set on studying in one of these outlying areas, that's fine for the future, but for the present find a dissertation subject close to previous research.

Jay's dissertation subject involved "Online Education at Florida Rural Community Colleges." His research took him to four colleges not far from FSU. There, in each community college, he found a staff member willing to help him with his surveys. Their ability to encourage their fellow faculty members to answer the survey questions was of immeasurable benefit to Jay's research. During this process Jay learned that he was a scholarship winner because of his dissertation subject regarding online learning. If the truth be known, Jay had, at the time, the only dissertation project regarding online learning, and his major professor, Dr. Bowers, submitted him. Well, the award for this honor was $300, and Jay promptly divided that by four and sent $75 in gift cards to each of the community college staff members that it helped him so much. Jay also noted that once data is collected, it needs to be manipulated statistically, not necessarily an easy task. But he learned that the "dissertation rules" allow students to get help with preparing the statistical argument to support the hypothesis; though the student needs to make the argument himself or herself. So Jay found an individual who was very good at this and helped him putting together his data in the proper format. During this process, Jay asked on a couple of occasions if the data he collected could be used to expand some of his discussions, because they were interesting. In each case he was told firmly no. He was told that he had essentially a contract with his major professor to answer the question that he posed in his hypothesis, and that he needed to stick simply to answering this question. This was great advice, and in August 1996 Jay successfully defended his dissertation and therefore earned a Doctorate in Education. (Afterward he presented his statistics counselor a nice monetary thank you gift.) Concurrently with Jay's studies, daughter Anne was completing her degree with a Bachelor of Science in Humanities. It turned out that in December of that year Jay and Anne each received their degrees in the same graduation ceremony, and the President of FSU actually recognized them, having them both stand to receive applause for their accomplishments.