Health Information Management School

There are a precious few times in life where it just seems like the stars have aligned and by some stroke of luck everything in life is going your way. Fargo health information management student Brenna Welton is currently in the middle of one of those great runs of luck.

However, attributing her recent string of success to just luck is selling Welton short. As the saying goes, you make your own luck. This is how Welton, with the help of Rasmussen College, created her own luck and began a new career she never imagined possible.

Making the switch

After graduating high school, Welton briefly attended North Dakota State College of Science with the hopes of becoming a dental hygienist. Ultimately, she was waitlisted for the program and she realized she didn’t want to tread water in school while waiting to get in to the program. She left NDSCS and had the first of her four daughters soon after. She spent several years working at a manufacturing plant near her hometown of Lisbon, North Dakota.

But as her family continued to grow, so did their childcare expenses. By the time Welton’s fourth daughter was born, the cost of childcare eclipsed what she was making at her job. That gave Welton more than enough incentive to leave her job and become a stay-at-home mom.

The transition to stay-at-home motherhood was an opportunity for Welton to not only spend time with her kids but to also make a return to school. Watching after her children is a full time job on its own, so the key for Welton was finding a school that would provide the scheduling flexibility she needed. She found exactly what she wanted in Rasmussen College and enrolled in the health information technician associate degree program in 2010.

Welton says she decided to pursue a healthcare related degree primarily due to the stability of the field. The factory where she was previously employed wasn’t doing very well, so it was often shut down. Healthcare, however, is “something that’s never going to go away.”

A successful start

Welton was naturally a little nervous about returning to school as it had been about a decade since she’d last been in a classroom. She says the staff at Rasmussen College did their best to keep her at ease.

“My student advisors have been great, ” Welton says. “They checked up on me probably for the first year or so and reassured me that I was doing good and that I could make it—that was super helpful.”

Welton’s worries prior to starting classes turned out to be a little overblown—she’s been a consistent ‘A’ student right from the start. The key to her success has been organization, something she needs plenty of when managing assignment deadlines, her daughters’ activities and the coordination of the gymnastics program she coaches. Welton says a lot of her success can be attributed to simple determination.