Alum and textbook author makes gift to renovate auditorium
Carolyn Jarvis' textbook has been helping nursing students learn health assessment skills for decades. Now her gift to UIC Nursing will help students get the most out of classroom lectures.
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They may not recognize her face, but nursing students everywhere know her name.
As in, “get out your Jarvis.” “Look it up in Jarvis.” “Turn to page 41 of Jarvis.”
The bible for many nursing students, “Physical Examination & Health Assessment,” is often referred to simply by the last name of its author, Carolyn Jarvis, PhD ’05, FNP-C.
Soon, students at the UIC College of Nursing will know her name for another reason. The alumna has made a major gift to fund a gut rehab of the first-floor auditorium on the Chicago campus. The fully modernized and updated auditorium will be named the Carolyn Jarvis Auditorium.
The largest lecture hall in UIC Nursing’s Chicago campus building, the auditorium is original to the 55-year-old building. As UIC Nursing grows – enrollment in the BSN program went up by 11% this fall – the goal of the project is to increase capacity and outfit the space with the latest technology.
Huge possibilities
It was while taking a tour of the building more recently that Jarvis says she was “sold” on donating the money to update it.
“While we were walking through the auditorium, students came and sat down. They said they had to come [to class] early because there weren’t enough seats,” Jarvis says. “They were using folding chairs.”
Jarvis spent much of her career teaching pathophysiology, pharmacology – and of course, health assessment – at Illinois Wesleyan University School of Nursing and Health Sciences in Bloomington, Illinois (when not working on her book or working as a nurse practitioner). Those same classes will be taught in the new auditorium, and she says she saw “huge possibilities” in the renovation.
Jarvis’ gift will allow the college to remove a stage, bring the capacity from 92 to 160 seats, make it accessible for those with disabilities, and add AV equipment to improve instructional capabilities.
“My idea of teaching pathophysiology and pharmacology is asking a lot of questions and getting students engaged and talking,” Jarvis says. “If the students were more comfortable in their seating and had more space … I think it would be more conducive to those critical professor-student interactions.”
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UIC Nursing alumna
Jarvis was already a successful textbook author when she decided to get her PhD at UIC Nursing in the early 2000s. In addition to her work revising the textbook and her teaching position at Illinois Wesleyan, she was also working as a nurse practitioner at an alcohol treatment facility in Bloomington.
To better understand behaviors that she was seeing at the alcohol treatment facility, she wanted to increase her knowledge of basic sciences through research.
“I love the basic sciences,” she says. “I need to know how things work, and UIC was the only [nursing school] that was going to give me a grounding in the basic sciences.”
With her home base in Bloomington, she commuted to Chicago two days a week (staying overnight with her parents in suburban Oak Park) to complete her PhD coursework. Her research focused on the cardiovascular effects of alcohol.
“I formed very close relationships with my classmates,” she says. “It was a really good fit with my advisor [Mariann Piano, PhD ’88, MS ’84, RN, FAAN, FAHA]. She had very high expectations, and I was ready for the challenge that she posed. I really wanted to work hard for her goals and my goals and the basic science.”
Capstone to learning
One thing Jarvis never talked about with her classmates in the PhD program was her textbook, although some people knew about it.
“I feel like my name is famous, but I’m not famous,” she says. “That’s as it should be. The book is the most important thing.”
She authored the first edition of Physical Examination in 1992 after being approached by the publisher, Elsevier, who had worked with her previously on chapters of other books. With crisp, vivid writing, and photos and art that perfectly complemented the topics, it was immediately a hit.
Jarvis has revised it every four years – the most recent edition, the 9th, with co-author Ann Eckhardt. (Her daughter, Sarah Jarvis, DNP, RN, a nurse practitioner in Ann Arbor, Michigan, contributed to a chapter in the 9th edition). It’s been translated into nearly a dozen languages and has maintained a high market share of health assessment books. Now 78, Jarvis is ready to hand future revisions off new authors.
The decision to make a gift to UIC Nursing was in part to acknowledge the impact of her experience there, and in part to ensure the future success of students. She says she admires the diversity among UIC Nursing students and wants to continue to encourage diversity within the nursing profession.
“It was a goal of mine to pay back UIC,” she says. “Really, UIC was the capstone of my learning.”