Stephen Brown’s family has been a healthcare fixture in his hometown of Mansfield.
His dad and brother are the second and third generation of Ohioans to work in the family’s optometry practice. His mother’s a nurse and an older sister is a physical therapist assistant.
CELEBRATING SUCCESS: UToledo recognizes the Class of 2022 with a series of stories featuring students receiving their degrees at fall commencement.
After graduating from The University of Toledo later this month, Brown will hang his own shingle in Mansfield as a physician assistant, working alongside an internal medicine specialist at a primary care office.
“Being able to pour back into the community that I grew up in, that’s definitely something I felt led to,” he said. “It’s incredible to give back.”
With so many healthcare professionals in the family, it’s unsurprising that Brown would follow a similar path.
As an undergraduate at Huntington University in Indiana, where he played soccer and majored in biology with a pre-med concentration, Brown found himself drawn toward PA school.
One reason was time — at 27 months, UToledo’s Physician Assistant Program is significantly shorter than medical school, allowing students to graduate and begin practicing sooner.
But the other big draw was the flexibility it would afford him.
While medical doctors rarely switch specialties after completing residency, PAs have the freedom to change from one specialty to another.
That, Brown said, enabled him to pursue a primary care job right out of college but still have the opportunity to shift to a narrower specialty later in his career.
Brown
“There is a big demand for primary care, and I felt like in my rotations I could see myself doing that sort of medicine. The longitudinal care and building relationships with patients were really appealing to me,” he said. “Eventually I could see myself specializing in something else, but I felt like primary care would give me a broad knowledge base to move forward with.”
Dr. Carolina Wishner, assistant dean of diversity and inclusion for the College of Medicine and Life Sciences and an associate professor and director of curriculum for UToeldo’s PA program, said that flexibility is something a lot of PA students like.
“It’s a good attraction to a lot of students. You can start practicing as an orthopaedic PA and down the road you can say, ‘You know, I want to do cardiology,’ ” she said. “You can jump around a little until you find exactly what you want to do.”
For Brown, UToledo’s PA program was a perfect fit, with strong foundational education, high-tech simulation, a wide range of hands-on clinical learning opportunities and faculty who went out of their way to ensure students stayed on track.
“The didactic year was filled with endless nights of studying and exam after exam preparing us for the clinical year to come. It was the hardest year of school that I’d ever experienced, but the professors who were part of my program were very willing to help,” he said. “They were concerned about our success, not about trying to weed anybody out.”
Wishner, who was one of his mentors at UToledo, said she expects excellent things from Brown.
“Stephen is a very, very good student. He’s kind, polite, respectful and compassionate,” she said. “PA school is intense. It takes a lot of hours of hard work, study and time management because it is a fast, compact program. However, Stephen was always willing to learn and not afraid to ask questions. He will be an amazing provider.”
