Wilkie Becomes First NGU Alum to Earn PA Degree, Too


For Kathryn Allen Wilkie (’16, MMS ’18), North Greenville University’s Fall 2018 commencement was a landmark day.


As Wilkie walked across the stage with over 200 other Crusaders, she signified the birth of a new set of NGU alumni: hers was the first graduating class in the physician assistant (PA) medicine program. What’s more, Wilkie became the first NGU undergraduate alum to graduate from the new program, launched in 2017.


“I don’t think I could be any more ecstatic than I am right now,” Wilkie said at graduation. “Te day I have dreamt about and worked so hard for, for many years, has finally arrived.”


Even though Wilkie didn’t always dream of becoming a physician assistant, exactly, the clues were there early on.


“It is no surprise that most people who work in healthcare have Type A personalities: there are numerous rules and regulations, things are black and white, and plans are made for following to a T. Well, I meet the stereotype,” she admits.


For example, when she was in sixth grade, she made the plan to become a physical therapist someday. From that moment on, she was extreme- ly focused on doing whatever it took to follow that career path — to a T. At NGU, she studied biology.


“My senior year of undergrad, I applied for phys- ical therapy school without a shadow of a doubt that I would be accepted,” she remembers.


A few months later, however, Wilkie heard back that she’d been waitlisted.


“I was honestly heartbroken because I had worked so hard to get to that point,” Wilkie says.


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Around the same time, Wilkie learned that NGU was starting a PA program. Classes at NGU’s T. Walter Brashier Graduate School for the new Master of Medical Science degree would begin in January 2017, the spring after her graduation.


But instead of pursuing that opportunity, Wilkie said she “wallowed in self-pity” and became frus- trated with God.


“I did not understand why things were not going how I had planned,” she remembers.


After graduation, Wilkie learned from a friend about an opening in an emergency department for a medical scribe. She took the position, hoping to add more healthcare experience to her resume.


Her first night on the job, she was assigned to work with a PA.


“I’ll never forget that night because it was the moment I fell in love with medicine,” she says.


After that, Wilkie started pursuing a career as a PA and never looked back. She applied for NGU’s PA medicine program, along with more than 500 other applicants, and snagged one of the only 20 available spots.


Wilkie says this story is important because it re- minds her that God uses even disappointments to “make all things work together for our good.”


“If it hadn’t been for the heartbreak of not being accepted into physical therapy school, I would have missed out on a career I love,” she explains.


For the past two years, Wilkie has worked hard to advance through NGU’s PA program, which consists of 131 semester hours of graduate work divided into three phases: the preclinical Didactic Phase, the Clinical Phase of supervised clinical education, and the Summative Phase.


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