The Comeback: A Medical Assistant's Story of Second Chances

When we talk about what it means to be a Medical Assistant, it’s easy to focus on the clinical skills: taking vitals, assisting with exams, managing patient records, navigating an Electronic Medical Records system. But ask any MA what the job really demands, and you’ll hear something deeper. It’s resilience. It’s showing up on the hardest days. It’s believing you have something to offer, even when life is doing everything it can to convince you otherwise.

That’s the story of Kandyce Anderson, a 2026 graduate of the AAS Medical Assisting program at Bryant & Stratton College’s Greece campus, and it’s exactly the kind of story we want to celebrate during National Medical Assistants Recognition Week.

A Winding Road to the Finish Line

Kandyce’s path to becoming a Medical Assistant didn’t follow a straight line. She first enrolled in the program back in 2018, shortly after having her first daughter. Life was, in her words, “everchanging, but still simpler than it is today.” She completed a semester, then stepped away. She came back, then stepped away again. A pattern that continued unexpected challenges kept pulling her focus elsewhere.

Eventually, the obstacles piled up faster than she could clear them. Her home life grew chaotic. She felt overwhelmed on her best days. Rather than reach out for help, she walked away from the program entirely, took a job as a legal assistant, and told herself that was simply how her story would go.

But her life kept unraveling with transportation problems, personal struggles, the loss of family members, Kandyce faced the kind of compounding hardship that would understandably make anyone give up on a dream. And for a while, she did.

The Turning Point

What eventually changed everything wasn’t a single dramatic moment. It was a slow, honest reckoning with herself. She eventually reached out to B&SC to find out what it would take to finish her degree and learned she didn’t have much academic work left. What she needed first was time to rebuild herself personally.

So, she took that time. When she was finally ready, she reconnected with the college and found faculty who welcomed her back “with open arms, warm smiles, and truly unwavering support.” Dr. Remita and Molly Low stood out, offering steady encouragement and sometimes the hard push that she needed to keep going when things got difficult again.

In her final semester, Kandyce balanced the demands of college with life as a working mother of three, a challenge familiar to so many nontraditional students. She found her breakthrough not in a classroom, but by watching her three daughters, then ages 8, 2, and 8 months old, mimic everything she did. She realized, with sudden clarity, that she was their role model. That realization reframed everything. She stopped making excuses and started making changes, one at a time, until the problems that once felt insurmountable began to be resolved.

The Impact of Her B&SC Education

Kandyce is quick to say that Bryant & Stratton College’s Medical Assisting program prepared her for far more than a job. Alongside clinical training with patient care, medical terminology, laboratory procedures, medical reimbursement, and EMR navigation, the program helped her understand herself as a growing adult. It helped her identify her strengths and weaknesses and build the confidence to step into healthcare and genuinely make a difference.

“Setting the bar,” she said, “means more than completing tasks. It’s about being someone that patients can trust and that the healthcare team can rely on.” That philosophy now guides her daily work in an OBGYN office, where she has built a career she and her family can be proud of.

What This Week Is Really About

National Medical Assistants Recognition Week exists to honor people exactly like Kandyce, the ones who show up even when they didn’t sleep the night before because their kids needed them, who give their best effort because their patients and colleagues deserve nothing less, and who quietly hold the healthcare system together every single day.

For Kandyce, being an MA is also a chapter in a bigger story. It’s step one toward her long-term goal of becoming a registered nurse in the emergency department. This Medical Assistants Recognition Week, we’re proud to celebrate Kandyce Anderson and every Medical Assistant like her!

If you’re ready to build a career that lets you make a real difference in patients’ lives, no matter where you’re starting from, Bryant & Stratton College‘s Medical Assisting program can help you get there. Learn more about our Medical Assisting programs today!