Leveling up

Earning a bachelor's degree is a monumental feat, but it becomes even more challenging when paired with part-time jobs, extracurricular activities and community service. On May 2, 644 students from the University of Cincinnati’s (UC) College of Allied Health Sciences (CAHS) will reach this celebratory milestone and move their graduation cap tassel from right to left. While many of these students will immediately enter the workforce, others are choosing to advance their educational careers. Meet four CAHS students who excelled in the classroom and the community and are using their undergraduate experience as a springboard to level up their skills in graduate school.

Caden Burkhart’s passion for service started in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, where his parents encouraged him and his siblings to give back to community members in need. Participating in a wide range of service activities throughout high school influenced Burkhart to pursue a career that would enable him to continue doing what he loved: connecting with people face-to-face and helping them reach their goals mentally and physically.

As a pre-physical therapy (PT) student at UC, Burkhart hit the ground running his freshman year, as a part-time rehabilitation aide on the staff at Athletico Physical Therapy, located on the edge of UC’s uptown campus. At the clinic, Burkart gained exposure to treatment services for a variety of conditions, including chronic pain, muscle strains and sprains, orthopedic rehabilitation and sports-related injuries.

“The College of Allied Health Sciences does a really good job at molding you for their graduate programs,” he says. “The classes that we take as juniors and seniors are core to the first-year classes that I’ll take as a grad student.”

Burkhart will begin UC’s eight-semester DPT program in mid-May, just two weeks after graduation. On top of forging new friendships with students who join the program from other schools, Burkhart says he’s looking forward to learning about manual therapy. Learning hands-on techniques will be a new experience, since he primarily helped clients with exercises at Athletico, and manual therapy isn’t part of the undergraduate curriculum at UC. He’s also motivated to gain more experience working in lab settings, thanks to an exercise prescription class that sparked his interest in working with lab tools and machinery.

Fueled by his experience at Athletico and his observation opportunities throughout his four years at UC, Burkhart is determined to work in an outpatient setting where he can engage with mobile patients and develop strong provider-patient relationships.   

“I’ve enjoyed every part of undergrad,” Burkhart says. “I’ve been very well prepared as a health care student and feel ready to conquer grad school.”

Ishika Patel has always been drawn to health care.

“When I was younger, I would tell people I wanted to be a doctor, but I didn’t actually want to be a doctor; I just didn’t know what [other opportunities existed] in health care,” she says.

As she grew older, she gravitated toward science classes, specifically anatomy and biology. During her sophomore year of high school, she volunteered at the Cleveland Clinic to learn what working in a hospital was like. She made rounds on patients, checking to see if they needed anything and spending time getting to know them. This experience, though cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic, solidified her desire to work in a patient-facing role. Eventually, she decided to become a physician assistant (PA) due to the flexible hours, team-based environment and ability to switch specialties.

As a pre-PA student at UC, Patel continued seeking out experiences to engage with patients in hospital settings. During her freshman year, she was introduced to Cincinnati’s hospital network through an Introduction to Healthcare Professions class. That spring semester, Patel volunteered at The Christ Hospital doing weekly rotations on a general medical-surgical floor, during which she’d check on patients, restock supplies and support nurses with tasks.

This will give Patel a leg up when she enters Indiana University’s 27-month-long Master of Physician Assistant Studies (MPAS) program three weeks after graduating from UC. She’s especially excited about the MPAS program’s small class size and the ability to develop relationships with faculty, which she cites as a major benefit of UC’s pre-PA program.

Patel, a University Honors Program student, CAHS ambassador and member of UC’s Relay for Life team (which raises funds for the American Cancer Society), is eager to broaden her exposure to diverse clinical settings and patient populations through the MPAS program’s clinical rotations. Regardless of the path she takes after grad school, she’s confident that becoming a PA — and not a doctor — is the right move for her.

“I love to talk and collaborate with people. I feel like that’s my best work setting,” she says. “As a PA, you have a team of advanced practitioners and a supervising physician. It’s a group effort to connect with patients and I love that aspect of health care.”

Mason, Ohio, native Kyle Ennis was determined to carve his own path after high school. His mother, an experienced speech-language pathologist and UC alumna, had long been encouraging him to consider following in her footsteps. Instead, Ennis continued exploring his options as an undecided college freshman at the University of Dayton (UD), where only a few members of his 1,000-person high school class had landed.

The summer following his first year, after debating pursuing psychology and medical school, Ennis decided to reevaluate the career path his mother successfully modeled. There was just one problem: UD didn’t offer a speech-language pathology program. So, he contacted Carolyn Sotto, PhD, CCC-SLP, a professor-educator of speech-language pathology and undergraduate program director in speech language hearing sciences at UC. Together, they crafted a plan that enabled Ennis to continue taking classes at UD for a second year before seamlessly transferring into UC’s Speech Language Hearing Sciences (SLHS) program in the fall of 2023 — and graduate on time this May.

To make the most of his two years at UC, Ennis embraced experiences that helped him excel in the SLHS program, starting with a lab assistant position in the Cincinnati Intelligibility in Neurogenic Communication Impairments (CINCI) Lab. While there, Ennis practiced studying conversations of people with Parkinson’s disease and using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy to measure brain activity. For his senior-year capstone project, Ennis switched his research focus to swallowing disorders at the Dysphagia Rehabilitation Lab within the UC College of Medicine’s Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.

“One of my main roles at the dysphagia lab is flagging discrepancies between swallowing ratings. MBSImP [Modified Barium Swallow Impairment Profile] is how we rate swallowing. My capstone is a reliability test of MBSImP as a scale,” Ennis explains. “It’s given me a lot of exposure to swallowing disorders, so I feel confident heading into grad school because not many undergrad students have that thorough of an understanding of dysphagia.”

While his research experiences motivate him to work in a medical setting in the future, and maybe even earn a PhD, Ennis looks forward to working with various patient populations throughout his career. At UC, he gained experience working with elementary students as a reading tutor at Evanston Academy and with dogs as a volunteer at FETCHLAB, UC’s renowned animal hearing clinic that provides audiological diagnostic testing and analyses.

As Ennis prepares to begin the six-semester Master of Arts in Speech-Language Pathology program at UC this August, he’s most excited to take specialized classes in stuttering, dysphagia and head and neck cancer.

“In speech-language pathology, you can develop a career that enables you to have a lot of variety,” he says. “I would like to build my career to where I’m doing research, practicing as a clinician and perhaps teaching classes as a professor. That’s the ultimate goal.”

Saydanee Jordan is a big “words person.” Known in her family and friend circles as the mediator, she’s who people turn to when they need someone to listen to their struggles and offer comfort and encouragement. This innate talent for helping regulate people’s nervous systems compelled her to pursue UC’s Accelerated 4 + 1 Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) to Master of Social Work (MSW) program.

As a BSW student, Jordan naturally gravitated toward opportunities to help others, and through these experiences, she discovered the population she’s especially inspired to serve: children.  

“I love kids,” she says. “I grew up in a big family. I always loved to take care of my little cousins, but also, I think [children] are overlooked for how many systems they live in.”

Jordan’s introduction to advocating for children in overlooked systems started with philanthropy work through Kappa Alpha Theta, which she joined her freshman year. Through the sorority’s partnership with the national Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) organization, Jordan learned how social workers support abused and neglected children in foster care and the court system.

Jordan, who was also a peer leader, first-year experience coordinator, co-president of UC’s Dance Marathon (which raises funds for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital) and a member of UC’s Social Work Club, says she appreciated the ample practice opportunities the BSW curriculum provided. Classes like Practice with Individuals and Families, for example, offered safe environments to role play interacting with clients, helping Jordan develop the language skills needed to respond in challenging client situations.

In late June, Jordan will begin the three-semester MSW portion of the accelerated program and dive into specialized classes on mental health. After graduate school and becoming a licensed independent social worker, Jordan hopes to eventually earn her art therapy license and maybe lead art therapy at a children’s hospital. Wherever she lands, she’s ready to amplify her impact.

“I had a professor my freshman year who talked about social work in a way that made me feel like I could change the world,” she says. “I’m continuing my education to continue my impact. I want to keep learning and working until I feel like a world-changer.”

While Burkhart, Patel, Ennis and Jordan all credit their respective programs' curriculum and structure for setting them up for success, they say the CAHS faculty empowered them to excel.

Sotto, for example, not only helped ensure Ennis could graduate on time after transferring into UC’s Speech Language Hearing Sciences program as a third-year student, but she also connected him to invaluable experiences, including his first lab assistant position and reading tutor gig. Meanwhile, Burkhart highlights the benefits of having faculty who teach both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses and the sense of relief that comes from entering a graduate program with familiar faces and mentors. Although UC doesn’t offer a physician assistant graduate program, Patel is excited to develop new relationships with the faculty at Indiana University, because she’s “used to having that support system” at CAHS. Lastly, it was a former BSW faculty member, Jordan says, who first recognized her leadership potential and encouraged her to grow her skills as a leader in the field.

“What makes [the social work] program so impactful is the faculty. All my professors are people who I can go to for help but also people I admire on a personal level,” Jordan says. “They’re also very involved in our profession and the community, so they practice what they preach. They’re incredible.”