Before she begins nursing school, and before she’s even graduated from Birmingham-Southern, senior health sciences major Molly Cowan is working full shifts as a patient care assistant at Grandview Medical Center.

Cowan first began this position during summer 2021 and worked full-time – 12-hour day shifts, three days a week – but has continued the work part time throughout the fall term, going into the pulmonary med surg whenever she can.

“My job is to get vitals every four hours, and I get blood sugar levels, help patients get up and use the bathroom, and change their sheets,” Cowan says. “I have five to 10 patients depending on the day.”

When she applied to her current position at Grandview, Cowan reached out to one of the coordinators of her high school internship class that first gave her the opportunity to shadow nurses in the hospital. She interviewed for and got the job and is now getting work experience that will prepare her for nursing school.

“It’s a lot of what nursing students do during clinicals,” she says about her job. “I’ve gotten a lot of experience already, and getting this jump start has boosted my confidence. Working closely with nurses has helped me a lot with understanding what a nurse does during a shift and how the hospital runs.”

Cowan connects what she sees in the hospital to what she’s learning through her health sciences major – which includes courses in biology, physiology, public health, and psychology – and her sociology minor. An E-Term course introduced her to geriatrics and working with non-verbal patients and patients with dementia at Oak Knoll Health and Rehabilitation and McCoy Adult Day Care Center. The course also helped inform the way she communicates with many of her current patients.

When she completes her senior capstone in the spring, Cowan is thinking about researching dementia, which will help her continue to learn about communicating and showing compassion as a nurse. A huge part of her position now, and something she will carry into her future career, is making sure she knows how patients are feeling and what she can do to help them and assist the nurses caring for them.

During a normal day right now, she works in “a regular old med surg,” but that has changed throughout her time at Grandview when COVID-19 cases have increased. During certain periods when the hospital needed more beds for coronavirus patients, Cowan’s floor transitioned into a COVID ward, and she assisted a diverse range of patients with different needs and symptoms. The cases on their floor increased the most during the spread of the delta variant this fall.

“I had to dress up in the gown and all the PPE, and then change between rooms,” she says. “And more patients needed a lot of assistance.”

But Cowan says these experiences – though at times they have caused a lot of panic for her and her staff – have not changed her plans to pursue nursing through BSC’s partnership with UAB and their accelerated nursing program. BSC students accepted into this program typically graduate one term early to begin nursing school, but Cowan decided to stay the full four years at BSC (where her dad, Dr. Tynes Cowan ’85, teaches in the Department of English) and hopes to begin grad school in January 2023.

“I think my position is very important to the patient. I can help them feel comfortable in the hospital, safe and taken care of,” she says. “Most of the time I go in, I don’t know the patients at all, but by midday, I know a lot about them, how they are, and what they need.”

This story was included in a special health careers edition of From the Hilltop, Birmingham-Southern’s alumni email newsletter.

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