by Van Mitchell – staff writer
Cody Wilkerson credits his mom’s life journey as an inspiration for him wanting to pursue a nursing career.
Wilkerson is a full-time faculty member of the Department of Nursing at the University of Central Oklahoma, and serves as the Traditional (Nursing) Track Coordinator.
“My mom (Cathy Maynard) is a nurse, and so I grew up hearing her experiences and seeing how much of an impact it made on us as a family,” said Wilkerson, MSN, RN, CPN. “She went back to school. She was a non-traditional student, and it just totally changed our family’s trajectory. And just seeing how much of a benefit that kind of was for her and for us, it just felt like, “You know I think all signs are pointing towards nursing instead of this med school business.”
Wilkerson came to UCO as an undergraduate student from Antlers.
“I moved up here for college right after high school and have just never left. I’ve almost quite literally never left UCO. I’ve kind of been involved either as a student or in some other role almost for the last 12 years,” he said.
Wilkerson started out as a pre-med major before switching to nursing.
“I started undergraduate as a pre-med major and then got a job in the hospital while I was in college,” he said. “And that pretty much shifted my perspective. I think what nurses are actually doing is what drew me to medicine. I loved the relationship aspect, building relationships with your patients and getting to know them.”
Wilkerson graduated in 2017 with his undergraduate degree, and then took a job at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital working on the surgical unit.
“We take care of head-to-toe surgery, so it could be neuro, or ortho, or urology. I mean, we see them all,” he said. That was my first job. I did that for a year. I was a night shift nurse.”
Wilkerson continued his educational push receiving his M.S., Nursing, With Honors from UCO in 2020. He is pursuing his Doctorate of Nursing Practice as a Pediatric Primary Care Nurse Practitioner from the University of South Alabama, with plans to graduate in Fall 2026.
“A master’s in nursing education always kind of feels like a good idea, so I started back really quickly after I took just a year off of school and then was back at UCO again,” he said. “I kept working at the hospital full-time. I graduated in May of 2020 with my master’s in nursing education. I started with UCO as a full-time faculty in fall of 2020.”
Students interested in earning a degree in nursing from the University of Central Oklahoma now have multiple options for their education. The core of the program is the traditional four-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing however there is a five-year plan for program completion available.
“At UCO we have four different paths in nursing,” Wilkerson said. “We have both our traditional and our fast-track programs. Those are for students who are not licensed and who are getting a baccalaureate degree in nursing. We also have our online RNDBS program for nurses that are already certified or licensed, and then we have a master’s program. We have a coordinator for each of those tracks. I coordinate the traditional undergraduate track (program).”
As the Traditional Track Coordinator, Wilkerson said his role is more behind-the-scenes.
“They (students) don’t really see me as the traditional track coordinator afterwards necessarily, because a lot of my work has kind of been behind the scenes,” he said. “A lot of my job is continued maintenance of those (nursing) programs. I am chairperson of our Traditional Track committee, so that’s all the faculty that teach in the traditional track.”
Wilkerson, who also works as a Clinical RN, Oklahoma Children’s Hospital, said he enjoys being a male nurse, and learning from his fellow UCO nursing faculty members.
“I definitely grew up being taught that women are capable of anything. And for me, it’s been incredible to be mentored by, especially as a faculty member, to be mentored by this incredibly intelligent, smart, capable group of women,” he said. “That to me, I think there’s just something really cool about that, the ability to do that, to see that despite what some of these prejudices that may exist in society towards any field that’s sort of predominantly female, there is hard evidence that these women are capable of anything they set their minds to.”
