May 17, 2007 :: No. 203

Kaylene Carr, a Cal State Fullerton student who has been accepted at several medical schools for the fall, has won the university’s Kenneth L. Goodhue-McWilliams Award for outstanding community service in the health professions.

It wasn’t an award she strived for. In fact, winning it took her a bit by surprise. She is very happy she was selected for the honor and so is her family, she said, but she plays down what led up to it: “I don’t really think of it as volunteering. I think of it as doing something for people who need it because you can.”

The award is named for the emeritus professor of biological science who sponsors the annual prize, in tribute to the student group that honored him in 1985 as its inaugural professor of the year.

Since Carr arrived at Cal State Fullerton in 2000 as a postbaccalaureate student, she has volunteered in the emergency rooms at Western Medical Center in Santa Ana and UCI Medical Center in Orange, participated in several Flying Samaritans medical missions to Mexico to provide clinical services and was the medical chair and the president of the Student Health Professions Association.

On campus, she has been a fixture since 2001 in the Nursing Department, where she works as manager of Blackboard classes.

In addition to her work and laboratory research, the Buena Park resident also makes time for volunteering at her church and coaching the CSUF Tae Kwon Do Club; she has won a number of U.S. competitions in the martial art.

Carr came by helping others naturally. Her father was a pastor, who at one point moved the family — Carr, her two older sisters and her mother — to Mexico City to be house parents at an orphanage. After a year, the family returned to the U.S. and her father took the pastor position at a community church in Lakeside, just outside San Diego, where her mother and father first met as teenagers.

It was a struggle financially, Carr recalls, with the family making do with clothing bought at thrift stores and other cost-cutting measures. “I remember one summer day my mom purchased a 10-pound bag of oatmeal cereal. She left it on the kitchen counter and ants got into it. Instead of throwing it away, we ate it anyway, because we couldn’t afford not to,” she recalled.

Carr and her sisters were home-schooled by their mother, and Carr earned her high school diploma at age 16.

From there, she went on to Pacific Christian College (later renamed Hope International University) in Fullerton — her parents and sisters had all attended there — to major in secondary social sciences, with an eye toward attending law school. But, in her senior year, she accepted an offer to teach at the Christian Academy of Baguio, an international middle school in the Philippines.

After graduating with honors in 1994 with her bachelor’s degree, she left for her new job, working in the Philippines for four years, the last two teaching at the Philippine College of Ministry. It was there that she began training in tae kwon do — in order to meet Filipinos outside an academic setting. She also enrolled at Hope International, taking online courses toward a master’s degree in management with an emphasis in international development. She completed the program in 1998, graduating with honors.

After hearing her students’ stories, meeting their families and seeing some of the needs in the Philippines, Carr said, she decided she wanted to help more directly. What could be more direct than providing medical care, she thought, and decided to go into medicine.

Wherever she has gone, Carr has impressed those around her.

“Beyond achieving good grades, Kaylene is committed to learning,” said Steven Edington, the academic dean at Hope International. Kaylene is personable and articulate. She is respectful of people in general … perceptive and aware of the social dynamics at work in a variety of social settings.”

Kathryn Dickson, CSUF professor of biological science, who taught Carr mammalian physiology, said that she earned the third-highest grade in the class of 57 students, “placing her in the upper 15 percent of students who have completed the course since I started teaching in the fall of 1998.”

Harold Rogers, CSUF associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who taught Carr organic chemistry, said: “Academically, I would rank Kaylene to be within the top seven percent of all students who I have recommended to medical schools during the past 25 years.”

After returning to the U.S. from the Philippines with her newfound goal, Carr enrolled at Cal State Fullerton for premed courses. She has now completed the 63 units she needed and will attend New York’s Albany Medical College in the fall. She said she is thrilled at the prospect of becoming a physician so that she can “provide the immediate relief that so many need.”

“I don’t know yet what kind of doctor I want to be,” Carr says, “but I will be one. What kind can be decided once I’m there.”

She is being recognized Friday at the university’s 48th annual Honors Convocation, in conjunction with commencement festivities.

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