Major Shantel Glass Earns Certification in Master Planning
Learn more about UVA Northern Virginia's Military Master Planning Institute (MMPI) through the eyes of Major Shantel Glass.
The Department of Defense Master Planning Institute at UVA Northern Virginia equips military and civilian professionals with the knowledge and skills to lead large-scale installation and facility planning. Through a sequence of hands-on courses taught by expert practitioners, participants gain a comprehensive certification in Military Master Planning, preparing them to address real-world challenges with confidence, creativity, and collaboration.
We sat down with Major Shantel Glass, a soon-to-retire Army officer with nearly 20 years of service and nine deployments to ask him about his experience in this program. From earning five degrees during his military career to applying lessons learned in master planning courses to real-world projects, Major Glass shared his journey, his passion for education, and why this program has been a game-changer for his transition into the next chapter of his career.
Q: Tell us about yourself, your background, your time in the service, etc.
A: I’m originally from Amory, Mississippi and graduated from Aberdeen High School. I went to college to run track and ran at Ole Miss under Coach Joe Walker. [Coach Walker] was the first coach I truly trusted, and his focus on education stuck with me. I left school a little early to run professionally, but I continued to train at Ole Miss and continued to further my education.
By the time I joined the Army, I already had three degrees. Most of the time when people are on deployments, they find things to do on the installation, but what I was always doing was taking classes.
Being from Mississippi, the idea of when people hear a Southern accent, they automatically think we’re inadequate. It wasn’t until 2007 in Iraq, when I had been working with the Australian forces for seven months, that I really heard my accent, and I felt embarrassed. That right there got me to a point where I decided I needed to continue to improve because I knew people were going to judge me just by my accent and the way I sounded.
Today, having five degrees, I feel that a person can hear my accent, and I can kind of see their reaction in their face—but once they find out who I am, what I’ve done, and the education I have, it’s a game changer. And so here I am at a little over 19 and a half years in the Army, I will officially be retired in May. Nine deployments, six to Iraq, Port Au Prince, Haiti for the earthquake, I’ve been to a lot of places. But with all that time lost, the most important thing is I missed time with my oldest daughter. So, I will retire because I want to be a parent to my four-year-old and to my 18-year-old. I don’t want to miss that time with my youngest and family.
Q: Can you tell us about your journey a little bit as a master planner leading up to this program?
A: Before going into this program, I hadn’t worked too closely with master planners, but I had collaborated with them. From 2012 to 2014, I was stationed in Korea for the Eighth Army. While working with Eighth Army Engineers, I worked with master planners on the relocation plan—In Area One, which is up in the Panmunjom area, close on the DMZ with North Korea, we relocated a lot of those base camps and some installation from that area. We moved those facilities and soldiers down to Pyeongtaek which is now the largest military installation in the world for United States forces not on the Continental U.S. While doing this, I got to work with master planners. As an engineer, I was really focused on design charrettes and making sure we got everything lined up for funding. After this, then the master planners would step in—I had heard of the Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC), but didn’t know fully what the UFC was. Later, at Fort Hood, I worked with Garrison leadership on similar relocations as a regimental engineer. That’s where I began to see the bigger picture of master planning.
When I found out about this program, I decided that I would go and take the classes. When I came, I think by the second day, I realized, oh, my goodness, I have to take the rest of the classes because they have a lot of information that I think is going to culminate and will help me fully understand [master planning]. This program brings everything into full perspective. It’s like what I’ve always learned as a leader in the army. You want to be outside the box looking in. If you can be outside the box, then now you can kind of see, you know, where your friction is. You can adjust things, you can direct, and you can mentor people, and you can make sure that they understand what the mission is so you can execute. And so that’s this course, that’s what it did for me. Now I understand the full picture and I’m able to plug and play.
Q: Can you tell us about the courses you’ve taken at the Military Master Planning Institute?
A: I think the biggest piece about it is the way that the program is instructed– each course that you take, it leads into the next course. You get to learn the importance of the UFC and master planning. As Dr. Young did the [capstone course] introduction, we learned that it was a project. That night, I went back to the hotel and looked over all the material that I received during this. I realized that [this class] was a big culmination of what we’ve learned, and you get to apply it. I liked the way that was. It’s like in the Army, we called it the crawl-walk-run phase. And so instead of just giving you this material and saying, go solve a problem, we went through the crawl-walk. And now I feel like I just became a part of the running club. Because I truly understand it and I know how they apply it. When I hear people communicating, I can actually comprehend what they’re talking about.
Q: Has your time in this program been a good overall experience?
A: Absolutely. I think it’s because you know that people care. Anytime you do anything, if you’re working with people that actually care and are passionate about it and they are true professionals, when you have these great thinkers at the top and they’re mentored and teaching and other individuals, the information that comes right back from that bottom up refinement, they learn more. What I respect is that Dr. Young gets to be around all types of master planners all over in the DOD. And so, she is still learning, she is a wealth of knowledge. And she continues, it like she just walks. I like to use analogies. If you ever go to those small parades in the South, the Christmas parade, Halloween parade, you are always going to have that one vehicle that comes by and all the people on the back are just throwing candy to the kids, right? When you look at Dr. Young in this analogy from this standpoint of teaching, she’s always walking around picking up candy. She is always getting new knowledge because she’s learning from the people in the course—they’re saying things that either she hadn’t done it that way or they just gave her a different way to do it. You always have many ways to solve a problem. You don’t always have to go point to point.
Q: We’ve heard from learners that these courses bring together people from all different backgrounds—contractors, participants from different branches of the military, etc. Can you talk about what it’s like to learn and collaborate with people from different fields and industries?
A: Definitely. Everybody likes to meet each other, that’s awesome. And so when you try to solve a problem, the one thing that I’ll tell you did it, I learned about while being in the Army Corps of Engineers– you go into this and you’re learning all of this information and you kind of have this idea of, I have to do all this critical thinking, I have to be so creative. That’s not how it works. They have this repository of what they call artifacts with different projects that have been completed. What you do is you grab one of those artifacts as a template and you start to build off that foundation, but now you reshape it. When you bring all of these people together from different facets of the government, they have a way to solve the problem. If you truly play the role in being on the team or in the class participating and developing relationships, now you can email a person and say, “Hey, this is a problem that I have. What do you think about it?”
Q: Any final thoughts on this program and/or UVA Northern Virginia?
A: The only other thing that I would say is the program is just great. I’ve talked to all the other deputies that I work with in my area to help spread the word. Some of them have military construction programs and they actually have people working on installations doing master planning in their district. It’s important to spread the word about this class, because while they do have master planners, it’s important to get these master planners certified. The word has to get out there.
Interested in learning more about the Military Master Planning Institute at UVA Northern Virginia? Learn more today! https://northern.virginia.edu/department-of-defense-master-planning-institute/