When Grant Mayer joined the military, he knew he wanted to make a difference, but he didn’t want to do it in a way that put him in a position to take lives. Rather, he wanted to save them, and to do that, he knew he’d have to enlist with the goal of becoming a field medic.
And that’s just what he did, which led him to where he his is today – a multimodality technologist at Emplify Health by Gundersen Onalaska Clinic. He took a non-traditional route to the medical field, eschewing traditional college prep courses for military training in the Armed Services and a collaboration between Emplify Health and what’s known as the Army Career Skills Program (CSP).
It allowed Mayer to intern with Emplify Health before his official military discharge, giving him the flexibility to earn his Army income while working in a clinical setting, all with the hopes of getting a full-time job in the Imaging Department – which he did earlier this month.
From sales to service
Mayer, a 28-year-old 2015 Holmen High School graduate, enrolled at Western Technical College straight out of high school to learn sales management. That led to marketing jobs at WKBT and a small farm near Coon Valley. But after about four years, he decided sales wasn’t his calling, so a career change was in order.
“Of course I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t want to take out more loans, so I ended up joining the military because they will pay me instead of me paying to get an education,” Mayer says.
Knowing the values he wanted to stay true to, Mayer joined the Army Medical Corps – with no medical background or training. Following basic training, he went off to school at the Medical Education and Training Campus in San Antonio to study radiology. His clinicals took him to Georgia for six-months before he was stationed in Alaska, where he spent the next three years.
“Up there, I got to do the whole radiology experience,” he says. “It was in a hospital, so we’re doing portables in the emergency room, we’re doing emergency surgeries at two in the morning.”
Following his tour in Alaska, Mayer moved to Kansas, where he began his transition back to civilian life. By then, he had decided that he wanted to continue his work in healthcare – and that he wanted to return to his hometown. That’s when he reached out to Emplify Health and talent acquisition consultant Craig Masters.
Just the start for Army CSP
Masters says Emplify Health has been looking to grow its military recruitment efforts, and Mayer was the first to introduce him to and take advantage of the Army CSP.
“He actually reached out and said he’d like to do an internship here, and so we thought, perfect,” Masters says. “We need a little bit of help navigating from his end, how do we go about this?”
So, Masters reached out to the Imaging Department, who said they’d love to work with someone with a military background. Mayer had already earned his x-ray technician certification, but he wanted to become a CT tech – something his leaders in the department were happy to help him achieve on his ambitious timeline.
“Grant came to us with a three-month window and a goal of performing the 125 exams required to be able to take the ARRT CT certification exam. He was able to complete these exams in one month,” says clinical manager of regional imaging Rachael Julson, Mayer’s leader. “The speed at which he was able to complete these competencies allowed him the opportunity to spend some time at our La Crosse campus observing some of the complex cardiac and interventional CT exams performed in that department.”
Masters says they were able to customize Mayer’s experience based on the skills he had and what he wanted to learn, and that same adaptability can be extended to other servicemembers with different interests within the system. It’s a program Masters says he’s excited to promote as an option.
“We’ve already been saying, this is something we can do here,” he says. “We absolutely want to share this message with others and are open to doing more.”
Teamwork
Mayer has a wife who stays at home with their two children, both younger than two. With that, he feels the weight of needing to provide for them. It’s what drove him to work hard to get his CT certification; in turn, he was offered a full-time role. But he knows it wasn’t just him who made the program a success.
“I tell you what, the team here, they didn’t get paid extra to teach me,” Mayer says. “They are awesome. I love the team here. That’s why I was so happy when I found out they had a job opening because they went above and beyond teaching me.
“I completed the goal that I had set for myself, and a lot was due to the team here.”
Mayer says he’s glad to be working with the people he is and in the clinic he’s at.
“It ended up better than I had ever expected it to be,” he says. “I accomplished my goal of getting my CT registry, I got a full-time job so I can take care of my family. All the boxes on my wish list have been checked off. Everything just kind of fell into place.”
If you’re a servicemember who’s interested in taking advantage of the Army CPS with Emplify Health, contact Craig Masters at ctmasters@emplifyhealth.org or (608) 775-0561.