Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
Creighton teaches you to do what you love and love what you do. Once I found what that was for me, I knew I wouldn’t work a day in my life.
In our Fast Forward series, we profile alumni doing unique, interesting and meaningful work in their fields, inviting each to connect the support they received at Creighton, however long past, to the person they are today. See more Fast Forward features here.
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By Micah Mertes
Hunter Allen, BSBA’14, MD’22, is an extreme rarity — a Creighton physician who first graduated from the Heider College of Business. In fact, only eight alumni in the University’s history have done both, with three current students following the same path. (Meanwhile, only 19 alumni in Creighton’s history have earned both an MBA and MD.)
Allen chose to make the unlikely leap for an unexpected reason: Because he really liked being a bus driver. Allen helped pay his way through business school — what his scholarships didn’t cover, anyway — by driving a bus for Omaha Public Schools.
“Every day, 30 sets of parents trusted me to keep their children safe, and I realized that I thrived in the responsibility of caring for the well-being of others. I realized that this … this is when I like me best. That realization led me to medicine.”
Allen, who comes from a rural area near Dallas, is in his third year of residency practicing family medicine at the Lincoln Medical Education Partnership in Nebraska. Next year, Allen will join Jeff Brittan, MD, at Midlands Family Medicine in North Platte, taking over the practice when Brittan retires in 2025. (Allen’s accounting degree, he says, will surely come in handy once he’s running his own business.)
Allen discovered his love for rural medicine during his third-year family medicine rotation and fourth-year internship in North Platte. “As a rural provider, you do anything and everything. I did more cardiology during my family medicine rotation than I did during my actual cardiology rotation. In rural healthcare, you can take care of the community in so many ways.”
In addition to his bus-driving epiphany, Allen attributes the direction his life has taken to the habit of daily self-reflection he developed at Creighton. It makes him feel more grateful for the day’s experiences, more joyful about the life he’s chosen. It helps him see to what degree he’s fulfilling the mission, meaning and purpose he first found at Creighton.
“Creighton teaches you to do what you love and love what you do. Once I found what that was for me, I knew I wouldn’t work a day in my life.” (Even if he sometimes works 90-hour weeks.)
Once Allen is running his own practice, he plans to continue inviting Creighton medical students for rotations, internships and potentially residencies. One current medical student he hopes to welcome is Rylee Amos, BSBA’23.
Amos was unsure of his decision to add an MD to his BSBA, but Allen — one of only eight alumni to do so — helped guide him through the process.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor,” Amos says. “He’s one of those alumni who truly embodies the values of the Jesuit education we receive at Creighton, no matter what degree you choose.”
