Learner Stories: Karla Larson

Nursing Instructor, Hospital Loma de la Luz (Honduras)

Before you walk a mile in Karla Larson's shoes you'll want to pick them up, turn them over, and shake well.

"Tarantulas and scorpions. You always check your shoes and your bed sheets," says Larson, a doctoral learner in the School of Education who is finishing her dissertation while living and working at the Hospital Loma de Luz in a remote village on the northern coast of Honduras.

"This is a place where the line of people at the hospital gate stretches far down the dirt road every morning," Larson says. "Not long ago, if you broke a bone, you just lived with the deformity the rest of your life. If you got appendicitis, you would probably not survive it."

Larson entered her Capella PhD program as she was just about to help create a new nursing school from the ground up. She would write a curriculum to be translated into a language that was not her mother tongue, for a culture that she was still learning herself.

Larson needed to learn how to introduce the strengths of her North American medical training without diminishing the unique strengths of the Garifuna culture she was entering. "I didn't need more education in nursing," she explains. "What I needed was the best information out there about teaching—how adults learn, how to teach in a cultural context."

She found Capella to be the place where she could gain that knowledge. After a friend introduced her to Capella, she did her homework, researching Capella's programs and faculty credentials. She wanted to make sure the PhD program would prepare her for the challenge ahead.

Living in a place where commuting means watching for bandit ambushes and wading halfway into the river to see if your truck will make it through, online learning has been the lifeline that keeps Larson on track toward her PhD and connected to the camaraderie of other learners.

"The online environment brings out the contributions of every student," Larson says. "I went into my Capella education expecting the challenging studies and intensive research, but the surprise has been the excellent ideas that come out of our discussions in the online courseroom."

"It's like a big think tank for solving the greatest current challenges in our field."