“I will tell you the honest truth, I was kind of shocked I got the award.”
This was Dr. Marie Prothero’s response when she learned she’d receive an Early Career Scholarship Award from Brigham Young University this year. Only four awards are given across the university each year. This award is given to faculty who are early in their career and show outstanding promise and contributions in scholarship early in their career. “Most people who are getting this early career scholarship are in their 30s or 40s, and I’m in my 60s.”
The example I want to lead to students is life-long learning. We can reinvent ourselves and continue on with our education throughout our entire life.
Dr. Prothero’s journey to academia was unconventional. She spent around 30 years working in nursing and healthcare leadership before she went back to school to earn a PhD. She wasn’t planning to get her PhD until then-Dean Patricia Ravert invited her to teach a course, NURS 492 – Capstone Clinical Practicum, at BYU College of Nursing for Fall 2012.
When they worked together in a local hospital as young nurses, Dr. Prothero said she and Patricia Ravert would talk about their futures: they always said that they should teach at BYU. “And somehow my life just kind of got away from that ultimate goal, and I couldn’t figure out how to get back to it... [Patricia] was that lifeline that brought me here.”
Dean Emerita Ravert may have invited her to teach at BYU, but Dr. Prothero said that it was the students that made her want to stay. “It was the incredible experience [she] had working with students when [she] was here,” that confirmed BYU was where she needed to be.
In fact, as the course wrapped up for the semester, Dr. Prothero found herself getting emotional. “I was so overcome with this university and the spirit here and the joy that I got in mentoring students in this class, that I—when the semester was over—remember saying to my husband, ‘I need to be at BYU, and I need to figure out how to get there.’”
This is where I need to be.
For Dr. Prothero, the path back to teaching at BYU meant getting her PhD. That summer, she started looking at PhD programs. She knew that she would need a more flexible job while she went back to school. She put the word out that she was looking, and, as she puts it, “if we’re just in the right place, Heavenly Father is blessing us with people in our lives.”
Someone she attended graduate school with here at BYU reached out and said he had a position at St. Mark’s Hospital that she would be perfect for. She would be overseeing risk management and patient safety. Hesitant to take it at first, her husband told her, “You can make that job whatever you decide.” So, she took the role, unaware that this decision would shape her scholarship for years to come.
At this job, she saw “the devastation, not only from physicians, but from nurses when they had made a mistake, particularly when they had harmed patients.” Since she was in the middle of her PhD program, she turned to scholarship to look for solutions. However, instead of finding resources for her nurses, she found a gap in academic conversation: research had been done on how people process mentally and emotionally after medical errors, but no one had spoken to nurses in particular about their recovery from medical errors.
She resolved that if the research hadn’t been done, she would do it. Her desire to help nurses process and prevent medical errors became the focus of her PhD work. As a teacher at BYU, her passion for helping nurses who experience medical errors has continued. Her research is centered on “Advancing nursing leadership and practice through studies on patient safety, preventing medical errors, and enhancing caregiver well-being.”
Being here and influencing the future generation of nurses is the greatest gift I have. I love it.
The Early Career Scholarship Award carries a three-year stipend and support salary to be used for research. When Dr. Prothero first opened the award letter and saw the research stipend, her first thought was her students. She knew that she would use the money to “continue to bless students' lives, to bring them into mentoring with [her] research.”
For Dr. Prothero, that is what makes BYU College of Nursing so unique. “I would say most universities don’t involve students in what President Reese calls ‘experiential learning.’” During her time at BYU, Dr. Prothero has mentored over 30 nursing students in research projects. This includes her five ongoing research projects, all of which involve nursing students.
As she looked back on the course her career has taken, Dr. Prothero reflected, “If I had not taken that job, if I'd done something else… In retrospect, you look back and you see God’s hand in your life in every single step. And I think, ‘Had my friend not called me… Had I not come here to teach one little class,’ right?”
Dr. Prothero hopes that she can be an example to her students of life-long learning. “We can reinvent ourselves and continue on with our education throughout our entire life.” This award will allow her to continue not only her research but her incredible mentorship of BYU nursing students.
Congratulations to Dr. Prothero for earning an Early Career Scholarship Award.