Leif Hardwick gave a college degree one more chance, staying on track with the structure of the program.
Leif Hardwick was more than motivated to try, a fourth time, to complete a college degree. After all, his wife had earned her Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree. His high- school-age son would be considering colleges soon, and how would it look if Dad never finished?
Finally, with the clarity of an end goal and a well-outlined path to achieve it, Hardwick walks the Texas Tech University commencement stage this weekend, having earned his Bachelor of Science in Leadership Studies through Texas Tech Online.
His lack of a college degree hasn’t held him back professionally; his experience has all come from on-the-job training. Hardwick, a Texas resident since fifth grade, is an account executive for Midland-based EnviroKlean, a chemical company serving the oil and gas industry. He’s been with the company for six of his 14 years in the business.
Hardwick handles new commercial customer acquisition, account management, upselling, and technical problem-solving for water treatment and recycling/reuse, often using information and resources from the Texas Produced Water Consortium housed at Texas Tech. He travels extensively around South and West Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Alaska’s north slope; he even flew to southeast Turkey earlier this month.
But Hardwick was not always ambitious regarding his education, demonstrated by choosing to start his own auto detailing business in high school.
“I didn’t really prioritize graduating high school,” Hardwick said. “I just went and did my own thing. I started getting behind. I even started Texas Tech K-12 (then TTUISD) my junior year, fell behind again and then decided I’d just take the (GED) test.”
Lucky in Love, Not in College
After earning his GED, Hardwick attempted college three times from 2009 through about 2016. He pursued business at the University of Phoenix twice and electronics engineering, construction engineering and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Southern Mississippi, finding electronics engineering “too hard.”
“I didn’t finish these programs due to a lack of personal drive and a clear end goal at the time,” Hardwick said.
What he did accomplish living in Mississippi was meeting Amanda, whom he later married in 2008. Hardwick jokes that the oilfield has saved their marriage because he’s often away.
“By the time she gets tired of me, I’m leaving again,” Hardwick said, cracking a knowing smile.
Amanda is director of curriculum for Leander ISD, overseeing the education of 42,000 students. Over the length of their marriage Hardwick has observed her earning three degrees, “powering straight through them, almost,” because she had a clear goal.
Hardwick has been inspired watching her journey, but working 60-hour-plus weeks and helping raise their son, pursuing a degree of his own was logistically challenging.
Their son Trenton, a sophomore who plays trumpet in his school band, has also seen his mom’s success, but Hardwick grins and says his wife hasn’t really failed at anything. On the other hand, observing his own path, he knows it will be good for Trenton to see him finish.
As if completing his degree and traveling for work weren’t enough, Hardwick volunteered this past semester for his son’s school by driving the band’s equipment truck during marching season. The father and son also find time to play golf together, boating and fishing on Lake Travis and attending Texas Stars hockey games.
A Well-Oiled Plan
It was while working at a hotel in Mississippi making minimum wage that Hardwick got an opportunity to come back to the Lone Star State, taking a job with a frac water treatment company in East Texas, quickly moving up the ranks. He got laid off before the company sold. After about a six-month hiatus in trucking, he came back to the oilfield – a career he’s made permanent. While his degree was still missing, this new attempt at completing college was going to be different.
“Now I have a career path I’m on,” he explained. “I’ve been in the oilfield industry 14 years, so I think I’m pretty much set where I am.”
Hardwick explored several programs and chose Texas Tech Online+. The program was designed for people like him: working adults, transfer students and career-focused learners. He also appreciated that Online+ offers 8-week accelerated courses, fast-track admission decisions and no application fee as well as credit for work-life experience, asynchronous learning and free career certificates.
It was that structure that drew him to the program.
He started in summer 2024 majoring in Leadership Studies with concentrations in Human Resource Development and Organizational Leadership. He came into Texas Tech with a sliver over a 2.0 GPA and has pulled a 4.0 through the entire program.
Hardwick knew he wanted to keep his GPA up, but once he found out that Texas Tech only considers their internal GPA for graduation honors and such, that made a difference to him.
“Coming in with a 2.0, there’s no way I would ever get any kind of honors,” he said honestly. “That gave me that extra goalpost. That was motivation. After that, it was all about organization, setting goals and then having the discipline to keep them. And I’m getting things done a lot quicker. Usually on the classes that are stretched out over a full semester, I get bored. If I get bored, then I start letting stuff drop.”
Hardwick says he also still has an issue with lessons he can’t apply to the real world. But once he found this path, everything else just fell into place.
Structured Success
It was Lance Pickle, Hardwick’s online student advocate, who led him to the Leadership Studies program.
Pickle says what struck him about Hardwick was his desire to maximize everything during his time at Texas Tech. From exploring the best degree program and finding course options each semester that aligned with his educational and career aspirations to how he could set himself up for success in that pursuit, Pickle thinks Hardwick took full advantage of everything he could during his undergraduate program.
“Leif has always been a lot of fun to work with,” Pickle said. “From the very beginning, I never knew exactly where he would be when we met for a Zoom appointment. He might be in some remote part of Alaska, or out in his work truck in an oil field. But his adventures never got in the way of doing everything I asked of him in terms of his degree. Leif was on it without delay.”
Hardwick says the courses have already helped him with project management and organization. The human resources classes all made sense to him because he could immediately apply them at work.
He even passed the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) certification exam in July. SHRM is an international organization with over 300,000 members that promotes the role of HR as a profession and provides education, certification and networking to its members while lobbying Congress on issues pertinent to labor management.
“I mean, I used to be a walking HR violation,” Hardwick chuckled. “Now I’m less of a pain to everybody. On the exam I just answered the questions the way I would not do them in real life. Everybody at work thinks it’s hilarious.”
Someone very impressed with his SHRM achievement is Morgan Provost, his instructor for two human resources classes. She shared the SHRM certification information with her students early in the spring semester. Hardwick followed up with her in April with more questions. Explaining that the exam is notoriously tough and pointing him to additional resources, Provost didn’t hear from him again until July, when he let her know he had passed the exam on his first attempt.
"Most people don’t succeed the first time,” Provost said with obvious pride in her student. “But from his introduction posts - explaining that he was working full-time in the oilfield, while taking 15 hours of online courses, and still finding time to play golf with his teenage son – he sounded like a hard worker. I wasn’t surprised.
“Leif’s thorough work, dedication and attention to detail have been evident throughout his time at Texas Tech. I feel blessed to have had him as a student, and I know that he will be successful no matter what he chooses to pursue.”
Finally earning his bachelor’s degree, Hardwick is on a roll. He’s been accepted into the Master of Engineering Technical Management program at Texas A&M, an online, cohort-based program with two weeks of immersion on campus. He sees it as a natural next step and an extension of the leadership program he’s completed at Texas Tech.
But Hardwick knows that Texas Tech’s Online+ program has, indeed, made that next step possible. Once just a tagline, the university slogan, "From Here, it's Possible™," now holds deep meaning as he nears graduation.
“The closer I’ve gotten to the end, the more it sticks,” Hardwick says, anticipating walking the graduation stage. “When I first came in, it was just another slogan. As I get closer to graduation, it’s made more sense.”
Find out more about the advantages of Texas Tech Online+.
