In anticipation of Veterans Day 2024, we sat down with new MEDEX Kona faculty member and Distant Campus Coordinator, Carrie Beebout, PsyD, MPAS, PA-C, to learn about and glean some wisdom from her multifaceted life as an experienced PA educator and Army veteran.

 

Let’s go back in time to when you began your journey; my understanding is you have a very long military career, around 20 years?

Army, yeah. So I joined when I was 17,still in high school. I graduated and shipped out.

I didn’t turn 18 until I’d been in the Army for, like probably 6 months or so. My mom had to sign me in; I wasn’t old enough to sign in for myself, basically.

You wanted to go!

I did! I really felt that I was not ready for more schooling. I didn’t do great in high school, because I just honestly didn’t care, and I didn’t have the mentorship. I was raised primarily by my grandparents, who had sixth grade educations, and so if I had struggles with algebra, I didn’t have anybody to help me, and they didn’t really care if I got C’s or got A’s.

So my thinking was: I’m gonna go in the Army for four years, I’m gonna get the college money, I’m gonna grow up a little bit, and maybe get to see some of the world. And then I’ll settle in, and, you know, get out and go to school and see what I want to do.

And how did that go? Your career is so—

Weird!

Well, I wasn’t going to say that! But it’s—storied, right?

Exactly.

So, how is it “weird”? What’s your take on it?

Even though I had an interest then in medicine, I ended up going in and becoming an Arabic linguist. I was taught to read it, write it, speak it. And it’s military intelligence—working with classified materials, and all the “secret squirrel” stuff. So that’s what I did. I worked my way up through the ranks. At one point, I was a drill sergeant for a couple of years, and then I became a First Sergeant, and retired as a First Sergeant. So I was in charge of 100 to 120 soldiers on a daily basis. When you’re in charge of that many people in the military, it’s really different than civilian life, because in civilian life you’re just in charge of them when they’re at work. But in the military, if somebody wants to go home and beat their spouse or their children, or not pay their bills, or trash their house, I’m responsible for that as well—making sure that they’re not doing those things. So, it’s kind of a 360 responsibility instead of just “9 to 5.”

So if they go home and misbehave badly, then they face discipline?

Right, either in the local court systems or through the military. I’ve I had to go to court with my soldiers that were in trouble. I’m sitting next to them in the courtroom when they’re going through trial.

That sounds intense. How was that experience for you?

It was a great experience. I had great colleagues that I worked with, other soldiers. That’s where I really began to love training. I was enlisted, a non-commissioned officer for the majority of that time, and our primary responsibility was training soldiers. Most of the time I was in was peacetime Army, and so you’re training for the inevitable, or the hopefully not inevitable, but you’re training for wartime. I was in basic training when, for the first time, I saw that kind of “Aha!” moment of somebody that I was working with that was like, “Oh, okay, I get how to do this now!” A drill sergeant sent me—because it was something that I had already checked off being able to do, that task— to help somebody that was struggling. And that’s when, it was like, “Wow, this is kind of fun helping somebody to understand something that they’re struggling through.” And so, when I became a drill sergeant, I was doing a lot of training of soldiers and really enjoyed that, then I became an instructor, and yeah, I always loved the teaching side of things.

And you probably had the opportunity to recognize in your students what was recognized in you in that basic training experience.

Definitely. Using your assets, taking the students that have it, that get it, and helping the other ones to kind of get through.

A lot of that sounds like it would carry over quite well into PA education.

It really does. I think the idea, especially if you think like a drill sergeant, is to take them from being basically raw material to being a finely composed professional, competent, compassionate provider at the end of it. In the Army it was a soldier—taking somebody from not being a soldier and making them into a soldier—and it’s really kind of that same thing. It’s working with them to get to an endpoint and shaping them along the way.

There’s one area in between that I’m curious about, which is how you ended up on your path to being a PA. What brought that about?

Well, as retirement came closer, I had always been interested in medicine. I don’t even know how long I’d been in the Army when I first realized what a PA was, and the military uses PAs extensively. I remember making an appointment at the clinic, and when I called, they said, “You can either see Captain Smith or Dr. Jones.” I thought, well, why are you calling one by rank and the other one doctor? Like, that’s so weird, right? And I had seen both before as a provider. It was then that I started kind of looking into this and trying to understand the difference, and it was because they call the PA by their rank, and a physician they call Doctor. So, I thought, well, these two people do the same thing. You know, what is this PA profession that they’re talking about? And so I researched it.

I actually tried to get the Army to let me go through the PA program [IPAP – Interservice Physician Assistant Program], to apply in. And they were like, “No, we’ve paid way too much for you to learn Arabic and get your security clearance. Just put your headphones back on and go back to work.”

So, I knew that when I when I retired, that’s what I wanted to do.

And so where did the medical experience come from when you applied for and entered PA school?

I was really kind of piecing a lot of things together. I had been Combat Lifesaver qualified in the Army. That’s a course for soldiers to take in units that don’t have combat medics attached to them. When my unit would deploy, we would go out in small groups on patrols, two to three people, and often be right up on enemy lines, or sometimes we’d end up on the other side of enemy lines. There was a big risk of becoming a casualty, and not having a medic anywhere nearby. So, I went through that course, and that helped give me a little bit of access, but when I was in Iraq I would go out on patrol during the day, and then in the evenings I would go to the medical clinic that we had there, and basically shadow. I was helping out there, volunteering, trying to get exposure, trying to learn things.

Then I was with the Red Cross after I left Iraq and went back to Germany, when I was waiting for my retirement, in that last several months. I would go down the Landstuhl Army Medical Center in Kaiserslautern, Germany, where I was a Red Cross volunteer. But there it was very hands on; when they knew that I was trying to go to PA school, I was helping to do bandage changes like all kinds of great stuff.

No more headphones.

No more headphones at that point, yeah!

So, as you were seeing your way out of the Army, you had your eyes trained on what your next endeavor would be, right?

Right, and you know, it was a big challenge for me. So, I got my bachelor’s in the Army, but that was also very patched together, because we’re talking about a time before the Internet really was much of a thing. There were no online courses, and so courses that I took, sometimes I would be able to take them wherever I was. On the installation over in England, when I was stationed there, I started taking courses through the University of Maryland; I actually took a biology course on VHS tapes! You would watch the tapes, and then you’d go into the testing center and take the test. But those courses did not have labs and so I knew that I was going to have to retake or take a lot of the prereqs.

I retired out of Germany and moved back to Pennsylvania with my family. My husband also was active duty, and he retired a little before me.

[There,] I took anatomy and physiology one and two. I would go in the mornings to one university and take chemistry and then in the afternoon I would go to another university and take anatomy and physiology. That was summer, so they were the shortened courses, the eight-weeks, and I did that through the summer. Yeah, do not recommend. Especially when you have young children at home! But I knocked out those required prerequisites, and was fortunate to get in, then, to the next class. This was as I was applying to PA school; I had my bachelor’s already, but I just needed the prereqs.

And you ended up staying in western Pennsylvania?

20 years! I didn’t even realize that we’d been there that long until I did the math, and I was like, “Oh, my goodness, I’ve been here like 20 years now!”

And in that time you went to Saint Francis University, right? Into their PA program?

That’s the university I went to!

I don’t know how familiar you are with MEDEX Program Director Terry Scott’s path, but he joined  MEDEX as a student in the early nineties, and he’s basically never left. He became a faculty member not long after graduating.

Yep, that’s my story. I graduated and said, do you need outside lecturers? And they said “Absolutely!” and so right away I started doing just a couple outside lectures here and there, and then it just grew from there. “Well, what about review sessions? Would you be willing to come in and do review sessions? What about critical thinking?” So, I got more and more pulled in that direction.

I went into pediatrics full time out of school, and I was moonlighting in the ER as well, because I was concerned about losing track of treating adults. So, I was in the ER maybe once every week or two weeks for an evening or a weekend day, and then mostly primarily in pediatrics, and then going into Saint Francis to lecture here and there. After being full time in peds for about seven years, I had some frustrations there, just in the way the practice was run being run and stuff. I asked Saint Francis if they had any positions open, and it just so happened they did, for the academic coordinator position—director of didactic education, I guess you’d call it. So, I applied, and that was that.

I was there for 12 years, about six and a half in that position, and then five and a half as Program Director.

And it probably helped a lot to have that understanding of the different experiences that you had before becoming the didactic director and program director.

Oh, yeah. I precepted PA students, and also precepted some nurse practitioner students, as well as some residents—family medicine residents—and some medical students. So I had this kind of point of comparison with everything as well. I think that was helpful, too.

What moved you to decide to earn a PsyD? What has this degree meant to and for you? And what was it like working on this degree as faculty member and burgeoning program director?

It seems like an odd choice for a doctoral degree, doesn’t it? I really loved psychology in my undergrad years, and then found that I was treating a lot of mental health conditions, especially ADD/ADHD, depression, and anxiety, in the pediatric practice. I wanted to do more for these patients than just prescribing meds. I thought, hey, if I’m going to get a doctorate, I want it to be beneficial to my future patients, and in something that I’m intensely interested in. I really enjoyed going through the program, and ended up earning a concentration in sports psychology, as I have always been passionate about sports. This led me to a new “hobby” of working with student athletes at Saint Francis, which is the smallest Division I school in the country. I worked with student athletes on pretty much every team, helping them to improve their athletic performance. I now use these same techniques to help PA students overcome test anxiety and confidence issues.

I felt compelled to start on my doctorate not long after going into PA education full time because I had some GI Bill money left over, and didn’t want to lose it. I became a PD when working on my thesis, which, you can imagine, was quite a lot to manage. But it all worked out in the end.  Also, speaking of my thesis, my topic was the use of sports-related video games to improve athletic performance. For example, can someone get better at football by playing Madden? The answer is: Absolutely!

Incredible! It makes so much sense that the brain can do that! Switching gears a little: You’ve also had significant involvement with AAPA and PAEA, and then there are also the medical missions.

Yeah… so I have trouble saying no. [Laughter]

So yeah, I got involved.

I also had a very good program director that mentored me. I think she knew right from the very beginning that “this is the person that’s going to take my place when I leave.” She really made sure that I was getting a good faculty development experience. She had encouraged me to apply to be a volunteer site visitor for ARC-PA, and she said, “You know, you’re probably going to have to apply more than once. Typically, that’s what happens, but apply, and then apply again next year, and… you’ll get picked up.” And I applied the first time and got picked up! So that was a very big learning experience.

Before that, I had been on a committee on Diversity with PAEA, and then I had the opportunity to apply for the item writing committee for the End of Rotation exams, and that was a much better fit for me. I’ve been on that committee for seven or eight years.

Still doing it.

Still doing it. I actually did resign from being a site visitor. Just the travel. I had a site visit in September, and the travel from Hawai‘i is just really challenging. It’s just a lot of work to prep for those site visits, and I thought, I need to be focused here. I need to walk away. And I thought, I’m not a program director anymore, so there’s other people that can understand the accreditation side of things. It’s really not my role.

Sounds like a healthy decision to make. Speaking of traveling and a lot of prep, how did you become involved with leading medical mission trips? What’s a memorable experience from one of those times, and how many have you led (give or take)? Is that something you envision doing again?

I was invited to participate in the medical mission trip at Saint Francis the first year that I went to work there full time (2012). I was just a team member on that trip but became the co-leader the following year. I love to travel, and this was an opportunity to go to new places while also teaching the students to practice medicine in a very hands-on environment. Leading these trips has been absolutely amazing. I watch as the students experience life in other countries and love seeing them have those “a-ha moments” when they hear their first pneumonia, examine a patient with an untreated neurologic disorder, or teach a child how to use an inhaler. I have led about eight trips, usually with 15-20 students each, and have also gone to recon areas for possible trips.

I always wanted to make sure it was a safe environment and would be a good experience before I would take students. I have taken groups to the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala. I would love, love, love, to take MEDEX students on a mission trip, and I have contacts in Guatemala who have already agreed to provide housing and transportation. That is the most recent place that I have been going, and the experience is fantastic, from the living conditions to the medical experience.

A memorable experience: We really take things for granted in the US, and so one of the things that we don’t think about is living life with poor vision. We just get glasses, right? But very often in countries outside of the U.S., they often don’t have that luxury. So, we collect donated glasses—prescription and readers—and typically have a suitcase full of them to take along. I remember on one of my earliest trips watching a student work with an older gentleman to try to find glasses that would correct his poor distance vision. He tried on several pairs, and then put a pair on and looked up, and he got the biggest smile. He could finally see again! The glasses were a style meant for women, with big round frames and lenses, but he didn’t care at all—he could see. He left very happy, and the student had a great sense of achievement in having helped improve this patient’s life.

And again, just having the experience in all of these different things. Yes, it’s a symptom of not saying no AND you’ve gotten so many different points of view based on these experiences.

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve met the most amazing people, and that’s a value beyond what people realize, I think—the ability to network and be able to reach out to people on things.

So how has it been, your transition into MEDEX Kona? Not only from being a program director, but also being just about as far away from where you were working as a program director. Now to your new job like, how has all of that been for you?

It’s been an adventure. I’m a bit of an adventurer. I guess you probably had figured that out!

Well, you know, this picture of you jumping out of a plane helped. [Laughter]

Yeah! You know, I think the biggest thing was the support of my family. My husband’s still back in Pennsylvania. We have a house there. He’ll come over periodically, I’ll be back there periodically. But when I first started looking to see what was out there, who’s hiring, the first thing he said is, “Isn’t there something in Hawai‘i?” Because I’ve always dreamed of living in Hawai‘i. And so when I found this, I was like, “Oh, my goodness! And they’re hiring! And it says they’re hiring for Kona!” And then I talked to my kids. I have three adult children, and they were all three like, “You’ve got to do it! You have to!” So my family was very supportive. My mom was supportive, but at the same time like, “Oh, do you have to go?” But yeah, I think that was very helpful.

And I think my military experience [helped]—I mean, I was used to moving. We moved every three, four years, or less sometimes. I know how to move. I know how to live rough a little bit. I had arranged to buy a car immediately after landing here, got picked up by my Toyota salesperson and driven over there, and then I had 3 suitcases, mostly with clothes. I didn’t ship anything. I got to the house and checked things out, and then I went to the store and I bought a beach chair and an inflatable bed and some blankets, and everything has grown from there. So I have a fully furnished house now that I’m renting and yeah, I feel like everything fell into place.

When I had that first interview with Misbah [Keen] and Terry [Scott], Terry said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait a minute. Are you telling me that somebody qualified has applied? You’ve got all these qualifications!” And I was a little taken aback, like, “yeah!” and I immediately felt appreciated.

From that point I was like, “I think this is where I belong. I think this is meant to happen,” and everything just kept lining up in that direction.

And how’s it been being in the community there? How have you felt? You said you always wanted to live there. Had you been there before?

We’ve visited Hawai‘i a number of times. I have a dog named Kona, if that tells you anything. He’s eight years old!

That is prescient!

That is how much I liked Kona, and every time we would come to Hawai‘i I’d say we have to go to Kona. And so [the fact] that the campus was here was amazing. It’s been fantastic. I feel I have such an awesome neighborhood that I live in. My landlord’s amazing. I meet people all the time; I get this from my dad, I will talk to anybody. The grocery store, out on the street, wherever. I constantly am saying, “I work for the University of Washington,” because it is surprising how many people don’t know that this is here.

I did a high school event with Pauline [Uchimura, MEDEX Kona Didactic Program Assistant] on Saturday, where we went and talked to high school students that are interested in careers in healthcare. It was great.

And then I had my UW shirt on, and I went to the grocery store, and there was an older couple that asked me, “Well, did we win the game today?” and so started a conversation. And I said, “Well, I have to be totally honest, I don’t even know. And I’m going to confess, deep down inside I’m a Penn state fan, but I work for UW now.” And they were like, “Oh, well,” and now they know that there’s a UW campus with 24 amazing PA students here. So, every opportunity I have to have that conversation, I have it. I wear UW stuff all the time. If I’m going to work out wherever, I will wear UW t-shirt, so that the conversation might start.

Everybody that I’ve talked to has just been super friendly. Free advice everywhere you turn. Where to eat, where to go to the dentist, all of that stuff. It’s been really good.

For current and future PA students and PA educators , what nuggets of advice would you want to leave them with?

You have to be all in. If you want to go through any program—honestly to become a physician assistant—you can’t be halfway in. You can’t stick a toe in the water and see how it works out. You have to be all in, which means you are going to be spent. This is probably the hardest thing you will ever do in your lifetime, for most people, so you have to be 100% committed. You have to be able to dedicate yourself, and almost every waking hour to preparing yourself, and it’ll be worthwhile in the end. It’ll be so worth it when you’re out taking care of patients. But you have to be all in.

Would you say that those who have a background in the military might be pretty well prepared to “be all in”?

Absolutely. I really feel that people that have had that military experience tend (and it’s never 100%) to have a stronger sense of dedication, commitment, a work ethic.

I jokingly say: Something happens, but nobody’s shooting at me. Right? So, you can send me a hundred emails and tell me I have to do 50 things today before I can go home, and I might be here till midnight, but still nobody’s shooting at me, and so this is better than some of the stuff that I went through in the Army. I think your perspective plays a big part in that. I’ve been through some tough things. Being deployed away from my kids being a big one. Being out in Iraq and patrolling the streets, we got hit by an IED at one point, and I’ve been shot at, and all of that. And so, when you put things into perspective, people that have that military experience, if we say, “Hey, you’re going to have to work really hard at this,” they’re like, “Okay, that’s kind of what I do.”

How long were you in Baghdad again?

About 10 months.

Was that your most dangerous deployment, would you say?

I’ve been in Kuwait a couple of times, , but Baghad was definitely the most dangerous. My husband and I were deployed together, which adds an interesting element, right? I’m thinking, “okay, we have orphaned children here if things don’t go well.” Our daughter was 4 months old, and the boys were 2 and 3 or 3 and 4, somewhere in there, when we had to bring them back from Germany and put them with family in Pennsylvania to get back over to deploy with our unit. Just knowing that my kids were in excellent hands, I was very fortunate in that. And how do you tell them? The baby’s the baby, she’s going to be fine as long as somebody’s feeding and changing her and holding her. But how do you tell two toddlers “Mommy and Daddy are going away, and we have no idea when we’re going to be back”? You can’t. That’s a conversation. You just can’t even have that conversation. There’s no way to tell somebody that age that. 

So many of our students—have kids, right? And they have to think about that. Or they’ve had to be in your situation, they’ve had a deployment, had to figure out who’s going to take care of their children and what it’s all going to mean or could mean. That’s a lot. But it also builds a lot of fortitude, I would imagine.

Yeah. And when I went to through the PA program, when I went through the didactic year, I was spending so much time studying that I was not getting to do a lot with my kids, but I still got to see them every day. Which was a big improvement. So, it was again kind of that perspective.

So, Dr. Beebout, it’s been great to speak with you. Do you have one final nugget of wisdom for the future PA educators out there?

Understand that it’s not easy to be a PA educator. I think many people leave clinical practice or cut way down on their clinical practice, thinking that education is an easy life, because a college professor just teaches for a few hours a week, right? And then they just have prep time and office hours. How hard can that be? And that’s not the life of a PA educator. It’s many hours.

It’s great interaction with students and a lot of afterhours stuff that you’re also doing to try to catch up. But if it is for you, then it is probably one of the absolute most rewarding things you can do.

I look at [where I am] in Hawai‘i; health care providers are very limited. We have a major shortage here. I could leave MEDEX tomorrow and go out and become a provider in Hawai‘i, and I could see maybe 25 patients a day on average. But by being here with MEDEX and helping these students to become competent PAs, I’m basically a force multiplier. Every one of those students is going to go out into practice and hopefully see 25 patients a day, and now we’ve really made a difference.

And it’s keeping with what [MEDEX founder] Dr. Richard Smith wanted from the beginning, which was the whole idea of “Multiply my hands.” You’re doing it.

Right? And yeah, as a PA educator, that’s really so important to be able to give to these students so then they can give to those patients.