Vivian has lived in Los Angeles County for most of her life, and has always known what she was supposed to be: an engineer, a lawyer, or a doctor. Her parents told her so.
“They kind of instilled in their children to pursue higher education, and not just in general, but for these core three fields,” she said. “Medicine was the one that seemed most interesting to me, but for a long time it was kind of something that I was being pushed into.”
She got on a pre-med school track in college, but she only discovered that she might have a passion for the field afterwards, when she got a part-time job as a medical assistant.
“It was really hands-on, and the patients were real people, with real histories. And I get to interact, and I get to do injections, and my personality meshed with people because I can be open and relatable.” Maybe Vivian did want to be a doctor – or maybe she didn’t – but now, finally, she had found a passion for the medical field.
The question was: What came next?
“There’s a whole checklist of things to do if you want to advance your career in the medical field, and I feel like I need to develop my experience, because I don’t really have much,” she said. “So I was like: I’ll pursue other fields within health care, and get training.”
She found Calbright while looking for certifications, and saw that the college has a well regarded free program in Medical Coding, and decided to apply. “Applying was easy,” she said, “but I got put on a waitlist because everybody wants this specific program.”
But her turn came, and once she had a spot it took her less than two days to get enrolled. She liked that, and the idea of completing her program quickly appealed to her. Calbright’s Competency-Based Education model lets students set their own timelines and study at their own pace, and Vivian told her instructors she wanted to move fast.
“At first it was kind of overwhelming. Obviously, when you’re experiencing something new, it’s always that kind of flash of, ‘oh, wait, this is a lot,’” Vivian said. “And then once you find your stride, it starts becoming easier. And so I went for it, and it kind of took off, and I was telling the professors that I want to finish this course early. And they said if that’s what you want, they would help.”
She’d been expecting to have to do everything alone. Instead, she found that Calbright was full of people who wanted to help her meet her goals. “The professors reach out and they’re very helpful, they give you background information and help you know what to do and what to expect. And the other students on the Slack channel were very supportive, and it was easy to talk to other people who are in similar situations to me.”
In the process, she learned that medical coding is also something she enjoys.
“I’m a person who can pick up patterns very well. And once I figured out that there was a pattern to things in medical coding, I kind of put two and two together. I was like: ‘Oh, okay. I see your terms for diagnosis, CPT for procedures.’ Once I saw the pattern, it’s pretty straightforward. I don’t know if this is how everyone else sees it, but it was how I did.”
Vivian completed her courses quickly, but not her association with Calbright. She found out there are paid internships to offer peer-support to other students, and she applied and received one. Now she was supplementing her income by getting paid to support other adult learners.
When she felt ready, she also started applying for a new job in the medical field but didn’t have much success at first. And then the Calbright community came through for her there, too.
She checked in with the head of the Medical Coding program, Cindy Carney, who has a long career in the medical coding field. Cindy went over Vivian’s resume and cover letters with her.
“Cindy looked it through and told me ‘this is what you should tweak,’ because sometimes it’s the format of the resume and the way you present the information, not the information itself, that can be the issue,” Vivian said. ”So I re-uploaded my resume on job board websites and started applying again. And then I started getting callbacks, and interview invites. Cindy has helped me out through this entire journey, and always been advocating for me. Sometimes that’s career advice, sometimes it’s just being a person I could talk to and laugh with.”
She found a job she liked with a large medical billing company with several offices across Los Angeles, one of which was just at the 30-minute mark from her home. “It’s also a hybrid job, so it looked really doable,” she said. She applied, got a call back, and then an interview request. And then another. And then another.
“We went through four rounds of interviews,” Vivian recalled. “Part of me was wondering: When does it stop?”
Her fourth interview was the most technical, where they asked her to prove she had the skills she was newly certified in. Vivian had been worried, but found it was a breeze.
“They asked me about specific coding scenarios, and I’m like ‘oh, I know this.’ I had an answer. I left the interview feeling so happy.”
She got the job, her first full-time job with benefits, and is now continuing her career in the medical industry. “It’s the first job that really feels like it fits,” she said.
One of the things that’s impressed her most about Calbright, she said, is that it let her follow her own passions and chart her own path. “It’s not one-size fits all,” she said. “I’ve tutored students who were having very different experiences that worked for them, and Calbright supports that too. Whoever you are, they make it work.”
