How Cherry Lockman turned her fear into a career

Before she started as a medical assistant apprentice, Cherry Lockman did not like hospitals. Since she was a kid growing up in the Philippines, she associated hospitals with trauma and loss. She didn’t even like to hear the word “hospital.”  

That, she says, is precisely why she went to work as a food services team member at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, Montana. And when 90-Day MA, a paid medical assistant apprenticeship and education program, came to Billings, it’s why she knew she needed to apply. It was all part of her plan – not just to face her fears, but to tackle them head-on. 

“I always knew I was scared of hospitals,” she says, “but I knew I had to try it, because it might be different here.” 

Part of her aversion, she says, was a loved one’s experience at a hospital in the Philippines, where quality of care is often tied up with socioeconomic class. For Cherry, that experience was both traumatic and formative. 

But she also saw the potential for healthcare to be a force for healing, particularly in the U.S., and she wanted to be a part of that. 

“I talked to my husband and said, I’m going to apply at St. Vincent and maybe start from the food services department,” she says, “and that way I’m already in the facility and I can observe what other positions there are.” 

She got the job. Right away, she knew she’d made the right move. 

“I liked it,” she says. “I would ask people all about their experience and what they do, whether they like it or not. I had a doctor tell me, you’re good with people. You should do something else, not just work here in food services.” 

So when she found out about the 90-Day MA program coming to Billings through internal Medical Group Updates, she applied. Launched in the Desert Region last year, the program offers a jump-start for people with little to no healthcare experience to join the clinical workforce.  

“I would ask people all about their experience and what they do, whether they like it or not. I had a doctor tell me, you’re good with people. You should do something else, not just work here in food services.” - Cherry Lockman, MA

Apprentices undergo classroom training for the first 90 days of the program and go from there to clinical rotation for seven months of additional hands-on training. They accrue paid time off and receive full pay and benefits from day one.  

Of 24 applicants in the Billings area, Cherry was 1 of 9 selected – possibly in part because she’d already gotten a head start through another Intermountain Health education benefit. 

“I always wished I knew more about medicine and healthcare,” she says. “but the costs of an education were prohibitive. I actually used the PEAK Program last year to take medical terminology, because I knew that was one of the prerequisites to medical assistant certification.” 

She’s now completed the 90 days of classroom training and is currently shadowing at Broadwater Clinic in Billings. She’s training on the Walk-In side first, and after 6 weeks she’ll move over to Family Medicine.  

After that, she’ll move through a few different specialty clinics. For Cherry that’s a bonus, to have exposure to several different specialty areas, so she can get a feel for where her interests are. Finally, she’ll take her certification test and choose which clinic she wants to apply to. 

That’s just phase one of her plan. 

“I’m going to start from here, and then maybe when this program is done, I might take advantage of other programs and become an RN,” she says. “They just had a similar RN apprenticeship program in Utah, but it’s not available here in Billings. 

“If it comes here,” she adds, “I’ll take it.”