Struggle To Success

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Struggle To Success

Nicole “Betty” Johnson ’14

Nicole “Betty” Johnson ’14 makes the journey to a top-tier medical career with a little help from her faculty friends

Nicole “Betty” Johnson ’14 was one of only three medical students across the country offered a neurology residency at Harbor UCLA Medical Center.

That’s something, considering that only a few years earlier, she was a pre-med student consumed by self-doubt and struggling through multiple-choice exams. Fast forward to today, Johnson has started her first year as an attending vascular neurologist at Wellstar Kennestone Regional Hospital in Marietta, GA.

By the end of her sophomore year at Utica University, Johnson had reached an inflection point. Placed on academic probation and declared academically ineligible to continue competing on the track and field team, she went to see her advisor, Professor Bryant Buchanan, fully prepared to turn the page and abandon her aspirations of becoming a doctor – aspirations she had held since she was eight.

“I went to his office, and I was like, ‘Dr. B., I don’t think this is for me. This isn’t really working out,’” Johnson recalls. She was completely unprepared for his response.

“At most places, they would’ve just said, ‘Okay. We get it. Pre-med isn’t for everyone,’” she says. “I mean, seriously, how many pre-med students do you know on academic probation heading into their junior year?”

"I had that support I needed in the classroom, but I also felt like I had a friendship with my professors outside of that."

Instead, Buchanan told her to give it one more semester. They were going to change a few things, starting with adjusting how she took exams. He trialed verbal reasoning tests in place of multiple-choice exams. Her test scores improved instantly, followed by her GPA.

More notably, she immediately demonstrated a greater aptitude for analyzing, interpreting, and processing the material. At the same time, he personally tutored her on how to reason through multiple-choice exams. By the end of that semester, she had cleared academic probation.

Meanwhile, outside of the classroom, she began doing research with Professors Tom McCarthy and Terri Provost.

Her confidence didn’t just grow – it soared, and she credits her professors for laying the foundation for her success.

“(The professors) were all just so attentive to what I needed to succeed,” says Johnson, who was accepted to medical school at Ross University in the West Indies. “If I had any issues, I was in their offices, and they always had time for me. If I hadn’t had them, I wouldn’t have gone this route. I would’ve absolutely chosen a different career.”

After completing medical school at Ross, followed by the four-year residency at Harbor UCLA, Johnson was one of only two residents offered a neurovascular fellowship position at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, the second-ranked neurological institute in the country.

Guidance and mentorship

Johnson’s story, as impressive as it is, isn’t an uncommon one among the community of Utica biology graduates. In fact, it’s what drew Buchanan to the University twenty-five years ago.

Prior to joining the faculty at Utica, Buchanan had a visiting assistant professorship at a top-tier land grant research university in the Midwest, where he previously was a post-doc. His time there was going exceedingly well. He was securing grants and publications, and his research was bringing a fair amount of national and international notoriety to the institution. There was only one problem: in the course of achieving research success, he fell in love with teaching and mentoring students. Those passions, he was told, were taking up too much of his time.

“That made it clear to me that being a professor at a large, R1 status institution was not going to be my best fit,” he says.

“When I came to Utica, what I heard from the faculty who I talked to during my initial visit, and what I heard from the students, was that faculty and students have a relationship. They can get to know one another, and know it’s okay to struggle. If you’re willing to put the effort in, we can fix it. It's guidance, mentorship – that’s what you get when you come to a place like this. And that’s what I was missing, and horrified that I was not going to be allowed to have at my previous university.”

That Johnson was able to pull herself up, overcome the gravity tugging on her dreams, and accomplish what she has so early in her career hasn’t surprised Buchanan. He is quick to downplay his role in his former student’s success. Instead, he credits Johnson’s personal agency, hard work, and direct actions, beginning from the moment she left his office, her dream of becoming a doctor surprisingly still intact.

“My memory of that day is very clear, actually,” he says. “That’s what we do here.

“Students struggle – here and everywhere else,” he continues, “but if they have the motivation to push through that, they can do amazing things. And Nicole is amazing. Nothing about her success surprises me. Why would it surprise me? It surprises me when at so many other places, they give up on students – cut them loose. That’s what surprises me.”

Confidence and caring

Johnson says her journey is a testament to the confidence and caring showed to her by a faculty of passionate, like-minded teachers and mentors.

“When I think back on my time at Utica, the thing I loved the most was how close we all felt with our professors,” says Johnson, who today in addition to teaching residents, mentors underrepresented, first-generation medical students as a means of paying it forward.

“I played racquetball with Dr. (Daniel) Kurtz and Dr. McCarthy. Dr. (Adam) Pack was my pre-med advisor and the person most responsible for helping me get into medical school – but he’s also the person who taught me how to swim. Dr. Provost, to this day, I still call her ‘Mamma Provost.’ And Dr. (Sara) Scanga, she was always the emotional support when I was going through tough times.

“So I had that support I needed in the classroom, but I also felt like I had a friendship with my professors outside of that. I think that was the one experience that I loved the most.”