Travis Wright is in his third year of the UTC Doctor of Nursing Practice: Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program. Photo by Angela Foster.
Few people would expect a motorcycle mechanic and a trauma nurse to have much in common.
Travis Wright—who has experience with both—can easily make the connection.
“When you get into the provider role where I’m at now, there’s a lot of critical thinking involved and figuring out how to diagnose what exactly the problem is,” said Wright, a student in the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
“The bike or the patient isn’t running right, but why?”
Wright, originally from Marietta, Georgia, began working at his family’s road race shop around the age of 16. His parents eventually opened a dirt bike park in “the middle of nowhere” Georgia.
“It was great,” he said, “but it is a very up-and-down kind of field. If the economy’s good, people are buying motorcycles and getting work done, but when the economy tanks, it becomes a lot harder to actually make a living.”
When the time came to choose a career, Wright didn’t immediately land on nursing. He tried computer programming and mechanical engineering, but neither felt right.
What ultimately stuck was how much he enjoyed his biology and chemistry classes at Kennesaw State University, which led him to pursue a bachelor’s degree in nursing, which he completed in 2018.
It was his time working in the trauma intensive care unit at Erlanger Hospital when he met Dr. Christi Denton, coordinator for the UTC DNP: Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program. A phone conversation with her encouraged Wright to apply.
“I knew that I felt like I could go on and do more than I was doing,” Wright said. “We talked it out and decided this would be the best fit for me.”
Now in his third year of the DNP program, Wright balances his studies, full-time work in the ICU and fatherhood.
He said he hopes his commitment to work and education sets a positive example for his children.
“Education was always something my parents harped on,” he said. “If nothing else, seeing somebody work hard and put in the effort to accomplish the things they want to accomplish hopefully leaves a mark on them.”
When he graduates, Wright plans to find a position and settle into practice, but he does see education in his future as well.
He recently started a graduate assistantship working with undergraduate nursing students and said he enjoys mentoring.
“We’re a teaching hospital,” he said about Erlanger. “Having students, picking their brains, teaching and seeing that light bulb moment is always really, really neat.”
When it comes to motorcycles, riding and repairing them is now just a hobby. Wright is OK with that, though; his passion lies in nursing and acute care.
“It fits well with my personality and my background in nursing,” he said. “All of my experience has been in critical care; whether I end up doing that or not, I knew that I wanted it to be an option. The acute care program was the most sure-fire way to make that a possibility.
“The instructors are very kind, very bright, some of the best people that I can think of to learn from. It’s a lot of work, but they care a lot.”
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