Community College of Allegheny County - Allegheny Campus - Pittsburgh, PA
ALLEGHENY VIEW COUGAR CONNECTIONS
APRIL EDITION
Allegheny opens its doors to future health professionals By ROBERT CASAMASSA Allegheny View Staff Writer Photos by: Robert Casamassa & Christine McQuaide Despite a declining number, according to research done by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research, Allegheny County still has one of the largest aging populations in the country. It is bustling with hospital and senior care facilities all over.
Student Success coach Chalese Floyd welcomes prospective students.
Pittsburgh Job Corps students are ready to depart on a campus tour. The need to train competent health professionals to place in those venues is great. “It’s a lot harder than you would expect in a community college,” said nursing student Ekaterina Petri about the difficulty level of her coursework. “They teach you a lot and work you just as hard as you’d expect from any other medical school.”
From an objective scope, it’s easy for one to be unaware of the plethora of career choices within the medical field. One purpose of the health careers open house at Allegheny Campus had was to give prospective students an overview of what’s available to them. Darla Coleman reviewed the Open House agenda while On Mar 15, participants students enjoyed complimentary sandwiches. filled the buildings of the campus to receive information on healthrelated fields of study at CCAC. Faculty members hosted demonstrations pertaining to the programs that they teach. Representatives from nursing, health information technology, medical insurance specialist, nuclear medicine technology and many more were on-hand to give participants the knowledge that they need Biology professor Sandra Bobick to be successful. Members of the science presents a demo on Biotechnology. faculty also gave demonstrations about chemistry, microbiology and biotechnology. Darla Coleman, director of TRIO Manolios said. “Many of the prospective supportive services at Allegheny Campus, students had lots of questions about what organized the event and said, “It helped me they’d experience during their two years understand, personally, what happens in of study. All who were present was very these fields of study so that I can provide insightful about what they would see in their better information to the students that I future studies.” Two more open houses will follow this serve.” The expo gave those who might come into academic year, when Allegheny Campus the school an opportunity to see the first-rate will host a college-wide forum, affording facilities and equipment that Allegheny participants the opportunity to be a CCAC Campus has to offer—including the brand student for a day on April 19. The next will take place on the 27th that new, state-of-the-art K. Leroy Irvis Science Center—and to shadow a few classes. Each focuses on the music and fine arts programs attendee was given a folder of enrollment at Allegheny. The culinary arts programs information for each program, a rundown will offer a ‘Taste of Pittsburgh’ which will of the courses, a guide on what needed to accentuate different local food favorites, be done to enroll as well as future career while featuring different areas of campus. opportunities. The tours lasted for well over (Robert Casamassa is the editor-in-chief of the two hours. Allegheny View student newspaper. He can be “It was a nice atmosphere and positive reached at cometpro57@gmail.com. The View’s experience for all who were involved,” co-advisor Malik Vincent also contributed to CCAC student ambassador Katherine this report.)
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ALLEGHENY VIEW COUGAR CONNECTIONS
By BRANDON KENNEY Allegheny View Staff Writer
Question:
What does being healthy, overall, mean to you?
“Your body, your mindset and working out. I know, for me in school, I make sure that I’m not overly stressed. I make sure I exercise, daily, and that I have a social life. I make sure that I don’t overwork myself.” -Ki’Aumbre Wilmer
“It’s actually ver y important to me. There’s a history of diabetes in my family, so if I can stay healthy, I can help control and, potentially, eliminate some of that risk.” -Don Krasinski
“It’s sustaining yourself without any machines or any sort of medical equipment, in general. It means having a good repertory system and being able to do physical things with getting out of breath.” -Preston Dennis
ALLEGHENY VIEW CCAC Allegheny Campus
“Being healthy, to me, means eating good because being without fruits and vegetables for dinner—you can still eat unhealthy stuff but you can’t have all that stuff on a consistent basis.” - Chad Kolarik
Contact Information: (Phone) 412.237.4429 Student Life Physical Education Building 808 Ridge Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15212 (Email) mvincent@ccac.edu Editor-In-Chief: Robert Casamassa Layout and Advisers: Lyndsey Kuzak Malik Vincent Christine McQuaide In this edition: Robert Casamassa Brandon Kenney Malik Vincent Editorial Policy:
“For me, it’s eating right and it’s exercising for at least one hour per day.” -Tina Vennebush
The VIEW is published as a service to the campus community. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of CCAC administration, faculty, staff and/or student body.
ALLEGHENY VIEW APRIL EDITION
Real World Opportunities Open for CCAC Nursing Students By MALIK VINCENT Allegheny View Co-Advisor With some of the top medical communities in the world located is within close proximity to Allegheny Campus, practical experience for students to compete with seasoned professionals for career opportunities is vital. The U.S. News and health report’s 201617 honor roll lists nearby UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside as its 12th best hospital, nationwide—not an abnormal feat for that particular health system. Once a student gets placed into the nursing program at CCAC, they begin their clinical experience within the first week of classes. It’s just one of the many things that makes the nursing program at CCAC stand out. “The clinicals are good because you get different types of cases that you wouldn’t typically get in the lab,” Lifeng Chen, a nursing student at Allegheny Campus, said. “As you go on, the cases get more complex and difficult. It really helps to get us prepared for our careers.” The nursing program at CCAC is the third largest associate’s in nursing degree programs in the country with 2,000 potential admissions students and 700-900 registered nurse candidates at any given time. Specifically, at Allegheny, it is the only
campus that offers both day and night/weekend class schedules of which they admit for both the fall and spring semesters. The main feeding points for nurse candidates at Allegheny Campus to participate in their clinicals are: Allegheny General Hospital, Kane Regional Hospital, Children’s Hospital of UPMC, West Penn Hospital, UPMC Mercy and Western Psychiatric of UPMC. First-year nursing student Amina Iskandarova is wrapping up her 2nd clinical semester at UPMC Montifiore hospital where she has had multiple experiences with patients who have suffered from the ill-effects of drug abuse. “It’s one of those specific occurrences where a medical situation meets a psychiatric one,” she said. “There have been opportunities to apply a lot of pain management skills, knowledge of pharmacology, and tactics that ensure that the patient is comfortable during the entire process. That experience, overall, has been very helpful for me.” For those that are looking to expand their education past CCAC, in hopes to heighten their status as a nurse, the college has established a joint admissions agreement with Carlow University.
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“There is a field that asks all of our applicants if they are interested in joining the joint program,” said Amber Reed, the admissions coordinator for all five nursing programs at CCAC. “If that student is admitted through that particular program, they do not need to reapply to Carlow when they begin to pursue their bachelor’s degree.” Diantha Bey, the department head of nursing at Allegheny Campus, attributed that the clinical and academic relationships that have been established with CCAC comes from many different sources. “There have been a lot of individuals: members of the board of trustees, faculty members, and members of central administration that have been very key in the relationships that we’ve been able to establish—especially in our surrounding medical communities,” she said. (Malik Vincent is the co-advisor of the Allegh-
eny View. He can be reached at mvincent@ ccac.edu.)
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ALLEGHENY VIEW
COUGAR CONNECTIONS
Faculty Spotlight: Health-related professions
By BRANDON KENNEY and MALIK VINCENT Allegheny View Staff Writer and Advisor
In honor of the Health Professions Open House that took place on Mar 15, the Allegheny View would like to spotlight these three faculty members that make the learning environment at Allegheny Campus worthwhile.
Michael Copppola
Maryann Anderson
Caroline Evans
Michael Coppola - RN, BSN, MSN, DNP Instructor, Nursing
After a stint in data processing, Dr. Coppola found a passion to care for the sick. That’s when he travelled to Pittsburgh in hopes of complete the nursing program at the Community College of Allegheny County. The native southerner did just that and then headed back to his roots to complete degree after degree until his graduation with a doctorate of nursing practice from the University of Alabama. Determined to make a return to where it all started, he turned down a job at Alabama’s Capstone College of Nursing enroute to becoming a nursing faculty member at CCAC in February, 2014. Quotable: “When I received the call that I’d gotten the job at CCAC, I turned to the person who was with me at the time and told them that I’d just gotten my dream job. Many people, especially on this campus, have a multitude of life circumstance that land them here. Some of them have real challenges. I love the work that I do in helping them find their paths. It makes this job all the more special to me.”
Maryann Anderson - Professor (department head), Allied Health
Maryann Anderson came to the CCAC community as an adjunct professor more than three decades ago. She received her tenure in 1990 and has served as the department head of Allied Health for the past 15 years. She teaches courses dealing with Health Information Technology, the legal aspect of health/medical records, while overseeing the clinical aspects within the field of study. Her job as department head involves coordinating each function of the department and to supervise every instructor that teaches within the Allied Health division. Quotable: “I believe our Allied health disciplines, college-wide, are great and they lead our students to great careers and professions.”
Caroline Evans - Principal Investigator (CCAC’s BioMas Workforce Collaborative) & Professor, Biology
Originally, Evans wanted to become a physician. Searching for independence after receiving her undergraduate degree in Biology and Chemistry from John Carrol University, she began to do laboratory work. The artificial heart department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center brought Evans to the steel city. She worked there for several years while working on her master’s degree in biomedical engineering before realizing that she wanted to take her talents to the classroom. Since, she’s been a key player in the establishment of the CCAC BioMas Workforce Collaborative that has generated a 5-year grant for $629,207. The grant defrays study costs for 12 full-time scholarships per year, capped at $6,160 per student. Quotable: “When I worked for UPMC, I managed patients with heart failure and I thought that was the end game. I thought that would become my career and my profession. Unfortunately, a lot of people died and I did not like that. So I went back to school and got a master’s degree in education… I thought I’d go teach in a high school and then a friend suggested that I teach at CCAC, try one class there and see if I like it… So, I did and I loved it. Instead of getting a job in a high school, I was fortunate to get one here.”