Amy Starke - Graduate Student with Global Background and Aspirations

Amy Starke takes unconventional path to FNP/CNM graduate education.

Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” concludes with the lines “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” This is a sentiment very familiar to Amy Starke, a graduate student in the University of Michigan School of Nursing’s joint Family Nurse Practitioner/Certified Nurse Midwife program, as her path to graduate studies was anything but traditional.

After graduating from a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program in 1998, Starke secured her first position as a professional nurse, working in a Pediatric Homecare clinic. After only a year, she was eager to get out into the world and do some more exploring, so she joined a Peace Corps initiative and traveled to Burkina Faso, a relatively small country in West Africa. “It was life changing,” she says chuckling at the simplicity and the truth of the statement; “I was living in a small village where there was no electricity and no running water. The people had nothing but they were beyond generous.”

When her two year project ended, Starke returned to the United States for her second foray into the professional field of nursing. Working in a community hospital in New York, Starke discovered a new passion as part of a labor and delivery team which would become the foundation for her future academic endeavors. At the time, however, Starke had another focus and left her job in New York to move to New Orleans where she enrolled in a Master’s of Public Health program. Her concentration was on international health and development and she finished the degree, but not without it reminding her of the time she spent working with the people and community in Burkina Faso. “I missed being out in the field. I missed providing healthcare,” she explains.

And so, Starke was on the move once again, this time traveling with Doctors Without Borders, an organization that strives to “assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe” (Doctors Without Borders website). Spending a year in Congo (Central Africa) and then eight months in India, Starke was back in action, combining her deep-seeded interest in clinical practice with her skills in public health. It seems Starke found something unique and personal in this particular application of her skills and interests as, for the next move in her ever evolving career, she was ready to return to school, this time arriving at the University of Michigan.

For her Master’s work, she knew she wanted to focus on women’s health, specifically within the provider capacity as a Nurse Midwife. She also knew that she wanted to be able to serve a more general population and so she was confident in pursuing a Family Nurse Practitioner degree. “Not very many schools offer a joint program in these areas. At most schools, you have to complete one program entirely and then move on to complete the next. U-M was one of only two schools, I think, that offered the two programs together,” Starke explains. “I was drawn to U-M not only because of the availability of the joint program, but also the opportunity to do international work.” So, to Ann Arbor she came.

It might seem as though being in a rigorous joint Master’s program would have slowed Starke down, but it hasn’t. Since becoming a University of Michigan School of Nursing student, Starke has completed a thesis, traveled to Liberia for research (twice), and presented at the American College of Nurse Midwives annual conference in Washington, D.C. In regards to giving a presentation at a large, well respected conference in front of a myriad of advanced practice nursing professionals, Starke says it was a good way of “getting my feet wet, so to speak.” She adds, “Nurse Midwives are a pretty friendly audience and plus, it’s not like I was talking about something that’s really controversial.” What she was talking about, in fact, was her thesis which built upon research from her work in Liberia. With the guidance and expertise of Dr. Jody Lori, Starke worked to develop forms for recording maternal deaths and near misses. Essentially, she explains, Liberia has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, and these forms were a way of starting to identify where the problem lies and addressing its preventable causes. “In a world where we all have our iPods and our cell phones, this type of preventable death doesn’t need to happen,” says Starke.

So what’s next for someone who already has such an extensive list of experience? “I’m open to anything,” Starke says. Graduating from her Nurse Midwife program in April 2011, Starke will once again be wide open to new adventures and new ways of using her skills. For now, she plans to move to Boston and work as a practitioner, ideally in a community health setting with refugee and immigrant populations. More long-term, Starke says that she aims to include “a good combination of research and practice” into her professional career. As for her advice to prospective nursing students, “Do what you want to do. I heard it most often when I was going into the Peace Corps: people would say, ‘If I didn’t blank, I would do blank’ and ‘If I didn’t have this responsibility, I would do something else.’” And Amy Starke, herself, is a shining example of her best advice: “You have to follow your dreams.”