“I played soccer for Columbia College, and Dr. Fairchild attended several games, pompom in hand, cheering on myself and a few of the younger nursing students who also played on the team. She knows her stuff, but she also knows how to teach the information as well as make it fun for us to learn. This may or may not include AC/DC music at 8 a.m.”
It was a natural next step in her career when Fairchild joined Columbia College’s full-time nursing faculty in 2005. Dr. Joyce Gentry credits her colleague with leading “creative, motivating and rigorous” courses. “She builds strong, professional relationships with her students and ensures that the students are prepared for the real-world of nursing,” Gentry says. Fairchild received the 2020 Trustees Award for Teaching Excellence, which is given to a full-time faculty member who demonstrates consistent excellence in the classroom and teaches rigorous classes with high academic expectations. In 2019, she was a recipient of the Columbia, Missouri, “Top Nurse” award recognized by the International
Nurses Association during National Nurses Week. Her research interests include the retention of at-risk nursing students by applying remediation intervention strategies. Most recently, Fairchild presented her research at the International Conference on Nursing Education: Practice & Research in February 2020 in Valencia, Spain. Fairchild received her BSN, a dual MSN (Administration & Education) and her Doctorate of Nursing Practice in Healthcare Leadership and Innovations from the University of Missouri–Columbia Sinclair School of Nursing. She is a nationally certified nurse educator and leads national one-day leadership workshops for charge nurses. When talking to students, she encourages them to keep an open mind. “I have held numerous positions over the years that at first I wasn’t sure about,” Fairchild says. “I was glad that I was willing to ‘give it a shot’ and try because I found out so much about myself and interests that I didn’t know I had.”
Fall 2020
A professional registered nurse for 35 years, Dr. Faye Fairchild spent the first 20 years in various ICU staff nurse positions, including nurse manager, quality improvement coordinator and senior-level leadership roles. However, she recalls her favorite days were those when she had a student assigned to her charge.
31 Affinity
Dr. Faye Fairchild
–KAITLYN TAMBKE ’20 DAY CAMPUS
