Outstanding MRI Grad Jennings Takes Winding Path to Success at Owens
Nicole Jennings grew up in Sunbury, just north of Columbus and about two hours away from Owens Community College. How she ended up at Owens involves a couple more stops and was anything but a straight line.
More important than how she ended up at Owens, Jennings will graduate in spring 2025 with an associate degree from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) program, located on the Owens Toledo-area Campus. She was also named the department’s outstanding graduate.
Jennings graduated “in the middle of the pack” from Big Walnut High School. Getting the outstanding graduate honor was something new and unexpected for her.
“Just to be able to come here and be awarded is amazing,” Jennings said.
She credits her time working in Findlay during her first year at Owens with giving her a leg up in the classroom. She did patient set up, some computer work and patient screening, almost everything up to actually scanning patients.
Jennings originally went to a university in New York to study forensic science. She got homesick and came back to Ohio, ending up at Bowling Green State University.
When she realized the path she was on wasn’t the right one for her, she remembered her mom suggesting a career as an MRI technician. Since she was already living in northwest Ohio, she looked around and found the program at Owens, the only associate degree accredited MRI program in the country.
“When I came here, I fell in love with it,” Jennings said. “I love the anatomy. I love being able to help patients. It was that extra push to keep me going in the program, keeping myself educated in the program.
“If you know you want your end result to be in MRI, I would not want to spend two years doing something I don’t want to do. I wanted to get into MRI. I came here, I’m doing MRI.”
Jennings is currently doing her clinicals at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus. With more than 1,000 patient beds, it’s one of the largest hospitals in the state. It also has eight MRI scanners.
In February, Jennings accepted a technician position at Riverside.
Her journey took a winding route, from central Ohio to New York to northwest Ohio, and it will finally land her back where she started. And quite literally—Jennings was born at Riverside.
“Having a job months before I even graduated, not everybody can say that,” Jennings said. “A lot of my classmates have a similar situation, jobs before they graduated.”
Published April 2025