Life after 30 provides new chapter for award-winning Physical Therapist Assistant graduate

June 28, 2022

Having watched their mother cross the commencement stage after earning an associate degree in accounting, Angelica Erwin always understood the value of community college.

When it came time to continue their educational journey in pursuit of their own dream job, Erwin chose the Community College of Rhode Island, the logical choice for an adult learner looking to pick up where they left off more than a decade ago.

Three years later, the 37-year-old Erwin – a BIPOC non-binary parent of two from Coventry, RI – is well on their way to a career as a Physical Therapist Assistant specializing in Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy.

Just weeks after earning their associate degree, Erwin won the American Physical Therapy Association’s 2022 Student Assembly Outstanding Student Physical Therapist Assistant Award based on their remarkable success within CCRI’s PTA program, which included four honors projects in addition to their clinical work at Performance Physical Therapy in Warwick.

As they continue in their field of study – Erwin recently enrolled in remote courses at the Herman & Wallace Pelvic Rehabilitation Institute and is working as a tutor with CCRI’s The Tutoring Center – the APTA award validates Erwin’s work, which is centered around their passion for helping provide more effective, unbiased healthcare for transgender and gender-nonconforming patients in need of physical therapy.

“You always hope your projects and your work are valued,” Erwin said, “and this award shows the areas I’m interested in and the work I see as important is valued by someone else.”

Erwin’s journey to Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy can be traced to a series of life-altering events. Looking back, they describe the first 30 years of their life as “living under other people’s expectations” – attending college, getting married, starting a family. In 2007, Erwin earned a bachelor’s degree in Communications from Villanova University, where they met their future husband, a budding engineer, Rhode Island native, and member of the college’s Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program.

After trying their hand at grad school, Erwin followed their husband to Japan, where he was stationed at the Yokosuka Naval Base as a U.S. Navy Submarine Officer. Over the next three years, they gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, and the family was temporarily uprooted from their home when the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011.

While stationed overseas, Erwin struck up a friendship with another American military family that founded the Tokyo Roller Girls, a roller derby league featuring teams consisting mostly of military personnel. Shortly after giving birth, they developed back pain stemming from the pregnancy and sought treatment from a PTA stationed on the naval base, which piqued their initial interest in that line of work.

In 2013, they and their husband left Japan and bought a home in Westerly, RI, where he was now part of the U.S. Navy Reserve. Three years later, Erwin gave birth to the couple’s second child, a boy, which temporarily delayed their plan to return to school to pursue a new field of study.

Erwin eventually reconnected with roller derby through Providence Roller Derby, one of the founding leagues of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA). Roller derby is an inclusive and progressive sport, developing safe spaces and community for LGBTQIA+ individuals.

Through this community, Erwin found the safety and acceptance to embrace their own trans and queer identity. A few of their friends from the league who identify as transgender had undergone gender affirmation surgery, but had widely varying information on appropriate aftercare. Through those lived experiences, Erwin learned about the lack of training within medicine and the PT and PTA fields when providing care for transgender patients. They wanted to advocate for those who didn’t know where to turn.

When both of their children were old enough to attend school, Erwin began writing the second chapter of their life. They and their husband divorced, but remained amicable. In the summer of 2019, they enrolled at CCRI to begin their journey toward a new career path.

“I knew I needed to make changes.” Erwin said. “Thankfully, I made them at the right time.”

CCRI reignited Erwin’s passion for learning. In their two years in CCRI’s PTA program, they rewrote the college’s PTA student manual to be more gender-inclusive, created an exercise fitness video for students to help them avoid injuries during clinicals, and worked at Performance Physical Therap, where they had the opportunity to shadow several pelvic health doctors – an “influential” experience that further nudged them toward that specialty.

“CCRI is an amazing place to get a great degree,” Erwin said. “When I looked at the success rate of their PTA program, I was amazed – nearly 100 percent passing their board exams and 95 percent having a job within the first year. That’s impressive. And the fact it’s a smaller cohort means there’s a lot of hands-on, one-on-one interactions with faculty and staff. I knew the program was rigorous and that the staff and teachers would be there and be present. I wasn’t just a number. That was important to me.

“The staff and faculty were also welcoming and recognized I was a parent. That’s the biggest asset of being at CCRI. They recognize there are traditional and non-traditional students and they make that space for everybody.”

As the APTA’s 2022 Outstanding Student Physical Therapist Assistant, Erwin is ready to initiate real, significant change in a field where, they said, on the first day of class you’re taught to “check whatever biases you have at the door because your patient deserves your best care.” They also hope to one day return to CCRI as a guest lecturer so that future PTA students better understand trans healthcare initiatives. Their new chapter in life is still being written.

“My 30s have been very instrumental in terms of me finding my truth and traveling along that path,” Erwin said. “CCRI was the extra bit that put me where I wanted to be.”

Share this story