Dona Clarin said she has known since she was a little girl that she wanted to make a difference in the world. As her career has journeyed from nurse to nurse practitioner to educator, Clarin has not only made a direct impact on her patients’ lives, but she is now training a new generation of medical workers to make a difference around the world.
Clarin’s office in the Carr College of Nursing at Harding University in Searcy is considered a safe haven for students. After returning to her alma mater a year ago, Clarin has been teaching nursing classes as an assistant professor while developing the new family nurse practitioner program that will start in the fall semester. She said she often has long conversations with students, and she hopes those chats make an impact on their academics, future careers and lives.
Starting a brand-new program at a university can be a daunting task at times, Clarin said, but aside from the certifications and technicalities of it all, she has two goals in mind: Form relationships with the students, and prepare them to be successful Christian professionals once they graduate.
“With our program, it’s a primarily online program, but we have students come to campus for three to five days at a time,” she said. “Yes, that’s course work and those kinds of things, but one of the things on the calendar is a cookout at our house so that we can really absolutely get to know them. When I was a student here, Harding’s motto was ‘Educating for Eternity.’ That’s still the mindset of the professors. We are not here to just teach them in the classroom; we’re here to form relationships and teach them beyond.”
Clarin grew up in Minnesota, and it was through Julie Bartch, the mother of a close friend, that Clarin started going to church as a child. In a roundabout way, Clarin’s relationship with Bartch — including her friendship with Bartch’s daughter, Tammy — led Clarin to look at Arkansas for her undergraduate degree.
“She was a great encourager, and she was that way for a lot of people,” Clarin said. “I attended a Church of Christ church in Minnesota, and my good friend Tammy and another good friend, Matt, were looking at Harding. There were also older kids I knew that came to Harding. It was a Christian school, and I came [to Harding] with the people that I loved the most.”
Clarin said she enjoyed her time as an undergraduate student at Harding. She compared that time in her life to being at summer camp, and she said it showed early on in her grades.
“I tell my undergrad students now — and I say it very slowly — my grade-point average was 1.013 after the first semester of my freshman year,” she said, “but I was awesome at playing spades! I just loved the people I came in contact with. It was a great loving environment.”
Even though she spent most of that first semester having fun instead of hitting the books, Clarin said, she loved the rules and boundaries set up by the university. She grew up in a home without boundaries, and she said being in an environment with definite do’s and don’ts was attractive to her.
“I found security in those boundaries,” she said.
Clarin did bring her grades up as she buckled down on her studies. She started her undergraduate degree in biology, knowing she wanted to go into the medical field, but eventually, she decided to narrow that focus and switched to nursing.
“It felt like that’s what I needed to do,” she said. “It was something in health care, and I knew that when I finished my degree, I would be ready to serve in health care. I didn’t have to keep going on and getting more degrees.”
After graduation, Clarin moved to Memphis with some of her friends. She started in the neonatal intensive care unit at The Med Hospital — now called Regional One Health — and was encouraged by the staff there to attend a neonatal nurse practitioner program through the University of Tennessee. She was signed up, but a couple of days before classes started, the school canceled the program because there were too few students enrolled.
Clarin spent one year in the NICU at The Med, then moved to pediatrics, where she became the supervisor for the resident practice group.
“I was the supervisor for the clinic with people who were training to be pediatricians and/or internal medicine doctors and pediatricians,” she said. “I did that for three years. I was friends with them all, and then once they all started finishing up their residency, which takes about three to four years, they were moving off, and I decided in 2000 to move to Seattle, Washington.”
She again worked in pediatrics when she was in Seattle, and she started graduate school to become a nurse practitioner while she was there. A year and a half after her move to Seattle, her mother was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. Clarin moved back to Minnesota to be with her mother in her final months.
“There, I did something totally different [from pediatrics],” she said. “I was at the VA. Since it’s a federal facility, you can have a license from any state and practice. I didn’t have to wait on a nursing license from Minnesota; I could use my Washington license.”
When her contract with the VA was over a year later, Clarin decided to go back to school and finish her graduate degree to become a nurse practitioner. She applied for a National Health Service Corps scholarship and was accepted to Belmont University in Nashville, then found out she received the scholarship right after she started classes.
A year and a half into the program, Clarin moved back to Memphis to do her residency. It was during this time that she and her now-husband, James, decided to take their friendship to the next level.
“We had known each other for nine years,” she said. “He was pretty much a confirmed bachelor when we married. We didn’t get married right then when I moved, but I started attending the church I was at before, and I was working at a community health center. We were married in November 2004.”
Clarin and her husband lived just over the state line in Mississippi during the early part of their marriage. While living in Mississippi, Clarin earned a doctorate from Samford University in 2013 and got a faculty position at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. Soon after that, she saw Harding advertising a new family nurse practitioner program. The program was in need of faculty, and Clarin decided to throw her resume out there to see what would happen.
“I told James, ‘Well, you know this is what I want to do, so I’m going to just turn my stuff in,’” she said. “‘We’ll just see what they have to offer.’ And here we are.”
Clarin said it was clear to her that the move to Searcy was God-driven. She was offered the program director position, and they were able to sell their house in Mississippi in eight days. Her husband had worked for the state of Mississippi for nearly 30 years, and was able to retire before the move.
“We love small-town life,” Clarin said. With a four-minute commute for Clarin, a house right downtown and a good school for the couple’s son and daughter, the Clarins are happy with their new life in Searcy.
The peace that Clarin feels about the move also applies to her work. She said she recognizes that developing a new program from the ground up is a huge responsibility, and it is one that she accepts humbly, yet with excitement, every day.
“If I believe that it’s God-driven that we’re over here, then I believe that he didn’t drop me off in Searcy. He’s still with me helping,” she said. “I have to remind myself of that when I get stressed.”
The staff members of the family nurse practitioner program have already received applications for the first group of students, and interviews will start Monday so the staff can get to know applicants better. Classes will start in the fall, and Clarin said she is excited to get the program off the ground.
Aside from her work at Harding, Clarin works at the White County Child Safety Center. She has a SANE-P — Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner-Pediatric — certification that she utilizes when she’s at the safety center.
“I see my role there as an opportunity to build up those children who are facing crisis,” she said.
Outside of work, Clarin and her family have spent the past year getting involved in the community. They attend Cloverdale Church of Christ, and Clarin said she is thankful her children are growing up near Harding, where they can see the place their mother started her journey into nursing and education.
For more information on Harding’s family nurse practitioner program, visit www.harding.edu/academics/colleges-departments/nursing/graduate-program.
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansas
online.com.