From State Trooper to engineering student

BY BROOKLYN MCKINNEY / Multimedia Journalist

While some parents went to the same college as their kids, not very many get to say that they went to college with their kids. However, this is the case for Jeffrey Shinn at Tarleton State University, with his son Grayson.
 

“My dad’s always been a person that’s kind of open to doing everything. He gets real into doing what he does. So, like, whenever he was formerly a DPS Trooper and he retired just a few years ago, he decided to come back to school for engineering,” Grayson said. 
 

Before coming to Tarleton, Jeffrey graduated from Texas Tech in 2002 with a degree in political science and then worked as a state trooper until his retirement in 2021. He decided to go back to school to pursue his interest in engineering, just a year before Grayson graduated high school in 2023.
 

“I know those two things don’t sound like they go together, law enforcement and mechanical engineering, but accident investigation is all about finding speeds on vehicles and all that kind of stuff,” Jeffrey said. “And so you use force, energy and motion when you’re calculating these things. So it’s a lot of mechanical engineering. So mechanical engineering combines a lot of different things that you need in order to do crash reconstruction kind of stuff.”
 

After graduating in December, Jeffrey has a job lined up with an accident reconstruction company investigating how different accidents on the road occurred for insurance companies or lawsuits.
 

His son Grayson has always shared his interest in engineering since he was young.
 

“Building things was like my passion, I had Legos and everything. I used to keep parts from random things and build them, and whenever I got the chance to actually make something with him those were probably some of the best memories,” Grayson said.
 

Grayson decided to attend Tarleton with his dad because of their close relationship, and there was already a lot that he loved about the campus.
 

“I just thought I’d come to Tarleton because UTA(University of Texas at Arlington) is kind of huge and impersonal. Tarleton is smaller, I know all of the professors here. You know, I’ve had multiple classes with each engineering professor, and so I like the feel of Tarleton a lot more than a big, huge university and Tech was kind of the same way,” Jeffrey said.
 

For Grayson, having the same professors as his dad just a few years later can get kind of weird sometimes, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.
 

“A lot of these professors that know my dad, they expect highly of me, because of course they had my dad that they taught as well. So, they expect that knowledge to kind of pass down and to help me through,” Grayson said.
 

Being on the same college campus as his dad definitely has its benefits, like getting extra help with classes and eating out together.
 

“If I ever need anything brought down from the house, he’s got me. I had several times where he’s helped me out with that. Every once in a while I’d come down, eat lunch with him and everything,” Grayson said. “The other day at the Dairy Queen, that’s like his number one place right there is… He always goes to the Dairy Queen and then gets the cheese bites.”
 

Jeffrey has not only been a mentor to his son during his time at Tarleton but also an advisor for Tarleton’s Rocket Club.
 

“Last year, I had no experience with rocketry other than shooting the little rockets off, you know, one-foot-long rockets, but they didn’t have anybody else to lead the rocket team,” 

Jeffrey said. “Everyone else had graduated from the year before, and so I kind of became the de facto leader of it. And none of my students that I had had any rocketry experience. So we had to figure it out as we went, and we ended up building a rocket and launched it a couple times pretty successfully.”
 

Being a nontraditional student in his early forties came with its challenges for Jeffrey. Between learning how to use newer apps like Canvas and getting sick long enough to set his class schedule back an entire semester, it was a lot.
 

“The challenges I faced were not your typical things,” Jeffrey said. “Like for me, it was figuring out all of the little things that you don’t think about, like trying to figure out Canvas. The first semester I was here, I think with one of the professors we had to turn in our first test on canvas and I was like, ‘How do you do that?’”
 

Jeffrey had to learn how to balance his responsibilities with Tarleton and advising the Rocket Club with his life at home as a dad and husband. His wife, Jennifer, works as a hospice nurse and they’ve been married for 22 years.
 

“I saw a t-shirt the other day that said ‘raising my husband is exhausting,’ I was like yeah, sounds about right,” Jeffrey said.
 

Jeffrey is actually following in his dad’s footsteps with engineering, and can’t wait to see his son Grayson do the same.
 

“Hopefully here in about two and a half years, we’ll have another engineer in the family. My dad’s an engineer, so at least three engineers,” Jeffrey said.
 

Some might say, like father, like son.