Interview Summary

Melissa Venzke has been a healthcare assistant since 2007, and she is currently earning her master’s degree at the University of Minnesota to become a music therapist.
Healthcare assistants can work in a variety of settings such as nursing homes, in-home health, assisted living, and hospitals. Melissa currently works at a hospital, where she helps with things like restocking supplies, checking patients’ vitals, drawing blood, and tending to patients’ basic care needs.
Melissa describes how healthcare assistants care a lot about their patients, which can often lead to burnout. Additionally, she says that people typically do not remain as healthcare assistants for their whole career because it usually serves as a transitional role.
Melissa works part-time as a healthcare assistant, which gives her the time to complete her master’s program in music therapy. She is typically scheduled five days every two weeks, working from around 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. However, she often picks up shifts to work longer hours.
To become a healthcare assistant, Melissa attended a tech class for about one-to-two months. Afterwards, she passed a skills test and became certified.
Melissa has a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance. It was not until her last semester of her senior year in undergrad when Melissa’s vocal teacher suggested that she become a music therapist.
There are a few ways to become a music therapist. One way involves getting a four-year bachelor’s degree and completing an internship. Because Melissa already had a bachelor’s degree, she completed the master’s equivalency, which requires two years of classes, an internship, a certification exam, and a thesis.
Music therapists perform similar tasks as doctors by assessing patients and determining their goals and needs. A big focus of music therapy involves helping patients with autism or mental health needs to find ways to better express themselves.
Music therapy is a field that you need to see in action to fully understand. There are currently some challenges with funding and programs being cut. However, more people are beginning to learn about music therapy and are pursuing this career earlier.

Healthcare Assistant and Music Therapist Interview With Melissa Venzke

What does a day in your life as a health care assistant and music therapist look like?

I live pretty close to the hospital, so I wake up around 6:15 a.m. before starting my work day at 7:00. I currently work in the emergency room, which is quite different from other medical settings like the ICU that are very structured. My shift ends at 3:00 p.m.; however, there are often opportunities for me to pick up a shift and stay until 7:00. This flexibility is a benefit of working in our department because it allows me to pick up longer shifts and work an extra couple of hours if I choose. Because I have worked at this hospital for a while, I have seniority that gives me a greater likelihood of being able to pick up the shifts that I request.

Every healthcare provider has a different schedule, but I am a point five. This refers to your FTE (Full-Time Equivalent), which is how many times you work in a pay period. A point five means that you work five days in two weeks, although I work well over that. I chose to be a point five because it is the lowest you can have to keep health insurance, and it allows me more time to pursue my goal of becoming a music therapist.

Working in healthcare is very different from an office job where you might work Monday through Friday from 9-5. As a medical provider, you can choose to pick up more shifts and work well over how much you normally would in a pay period. There are drawbacks to this, however, because it can lead to you working too much. If I do not pick up any additional shifts, my normal work schedule consists of five shifts every two weeks, with my work days starting at 7:00 a.m. and ending at 3:00 p.m. The shifts are very different: some people come in at 11:00 a.m. and stay until 11:00 p.m., some come in at 3:00 p.m. and stay until 11:00 p.m., and others work overnight. As a nursing assistant, there is a lot of flexibility in the work schedule, which is great if you have a family or are a college student.

One of my main roles at work is being in charge of the flow of the hospital. To describe the role of nurse assistants, I love to use the metaphor that we are the oil to the machine. Nurse assistants are in charge of many things around the hospital, including restocking supplies, checking patients’ vitals, and tending to patients’ daily care needs. For example, if a patient turns their light on to signal that they need to use the restroom, we help with that. Additionally, we transport patients upstairs to the inpatient area when their room is ready. Nurse assistants also help with holding during casting, performing EKGs on patients’ hearts, drawing blood, assisting paramedics during trauma cases, cleaning and flipping rooms when patients leave the hospital, and taking patients to the front when they are discharged. Nurse assistants are also responsible for helping patients with things like bed bugs, lice, or if they are covered in feces, although many do not enjoy this part of the job. Being a nurse assistant is truly a job that is nonstop with so much to do.

What does being a healthcare assistant and music therapist mean to you?

As a healthcare assistant, you get to anticipate the needs of others, which has really taught me about how to listen and pay attention to people. In this job, I truly believe that you get out of it what you put into it. I feel like my role as a healthcare assistant has increased my emotional intelligence tenfold because I have to be able to walk into a room and get a sense of how people are doing. As a healthcare assistant, you are there to help every person in the room, including the patients, nurses, doctors, family members, and anyone else you interact with. However, I also think that this aspect of the job can be very challenging.

There are various roles for healthcare assistants in many different settings. For example, a healthcare assistant working in a nursing home might be doing daily care for patients, such as checking their vitals, feeding them, and assisting them with their hygiene needs. On the other hand, healthcare assistants working in hospitals have a different skill set. For example, they will be checking vitals, drawing blood, assisting the doctors in the stabilization room, calling upstairs to get blood for trauma cases, feeding patients, and caring for patients’ hygiene needs.

While healthcare assistants can have different roles depending on the setting, they are all working towards the common goal of assisting and helping patients to know that they are being heard and cared for. Healthcare assistants are often in the room more than any other provider. However, this is a little ironic because healthcare assistants are usually never mentioned on any medical show that you may watch.

In this role, you really have to care about your patients, which can lead to burnout in some cases. As a result, it is really important for healthcare assistants to be taking care of themselves outside of the hospital. Most people do not have this job for their whole career because it is quite challenging and usually serves as a transitional role. It’s also difficult because you are only receiving a fraction of what other people are getting paid, even though you are in the room so much with patients. Despite these challenges, there are some people who stay in this career for their entire lives, and they have hearts of gold. My mom was a healthcare assistant for a very long time until she transitioned out of her field. In fact, she is the reason why I decided to pursue this career.

I am also really looking forward to my upcoming role as a music therapist. I truly think that music can help patients with their mental health, and I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to use my musical background to help more people. Especially in the state of Minnesota, there have been a lot of grant opportunities that have opened up funding for music therapists, which is really exciting.

Over time, I think that more people are beginning to learn about the role of music therapists. Personally, I didn’t even know that music therapy existed until the last semester of my senior year in undergrad. At the time, my vocal teacher advised me to look into music therapy because it would be a great combination of my passion for music and medicine. My teacher suggested that I watch a TED Talk about music therapy, and when I eventually watched it, I began to sob because I felt like this was the missing puzzle piece to my medical journey. I truly believe that if you are passionate about music and medicine, then music therapy is definitely something you should consider.

As music therapists, we perform similar tasks as doctors do, such as assessing patients, seeing what their goals and needs are, and coming up with objectives for them. For example, someone with autism could benefit from music therapy because of the way that music is structured. In fact, music therapy is known to help people with autism accomplish their goals in communication, group work, and so much more. To reach these objectives, music therapists will use instruments or any type of musical expression.

One of the biggest things that I learned during my internship is that adults and children with mental health needs like depression and anxiety have a strong desire for expression. Music truly serves as a beautiful avenue for this. Oftentimes, patients have songs that they love where the lyrics just seem to hit right. With these songs, music therapists can utilize lyric replacement, which is when certain lyrics are taken out of a song and patients then replace the lyrics with their own words. This significantly helps patients who struggle with expressing themselves or finding the right words for what they want to say.

Every week, music therapists can meet with an adult or child with mental health needs to create goals, helping them express themselves and work through whatever they are struggling with. This truly creates a bond between the client and therapist.

Music therapy is a broad career where you can work in settings like the NICU or even in hospice care. I think that one of the hardest things about music therapy is that you have to see it to truly understand how it works. It’s awesome when people see videos of kids with autism who are using music therapy to learn skills like how to communicate, work in group settings, or express their needs. There are also videos of music therapists helping patients with Parkinson’s to walk down a hallway using gate training. This is accomplished through timing with music or walking with the patient while playing a guitar. The specific rhythms music therapists play on the guitar helps patients with Parkinson’s to walk smoother. When people are able to see music therapists in action, it is a very eye-opening experience because there are such visible results that music has on patients.

Can you tell us about yourself?

My name is Melissa, and I have worked as a nursing assistant since 2007. Throughout my career, I have worked with all types of age groups, from babies to the elderly. I have worked in nursing homes, in-home health, assisted living, and I’ve currently been working at HCMC downtown in the emergency room for almost 10 years. This has been a mind-blowing experience and I never thought that I would work as a healthcare assistant for as long as I have.

I also have a background in music with a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance. I play a few instruments, including the piano, guitar, and percussion instruments. However, my main instrument is my voice. Currently, I am getting my master’s degree in music therapy, which is something that I am very close to finishing. I’ve already finished my internship, so all I have left is to take my exam and finish my thesis (which I’m currently analyzing data for).

I think that medicine should be looked at with a holistic approach as our mind and bodies affect each other in many different ways. This means that if we are treating one thing, either our mind or body, then we also have to treat the other.

Full Q&A With Melissa Venzke

How did you become interested in being a healthcare assistant and music therapist?

I had exposure to the career of healthcare assistants through my mom. She had started working as a healthcare assistant when I was about two or three years old, and she would come home telling me the craziest stories. As a kid, I would always tell my mom that I could never do her job. When I got older, however, my views changed.

In high school, some girls in my class were talking about how they were going to sign up to become healthcare assistants because it paid about three times the amount that their jobs in the food industry did. This made me start to consider the career as I knew that the money would help me get through college. My faith is also really important to me, and my heart and spirit were telling me to pursue this career. I then decided to call my mom and tell her that I wanted to pursue a career as a nursing assistant. My mom immediately reached out to the tech, and they told her that they had an opening where I could start on Monday. I took the required class, listened to God, and becoming a healthcare assistant became the best decision of my life. This career has truly molded me into who I am today and changed my life forever. I feel like God knew this was my calling, and with my mom’s example and encouragement, I have become the version of myself I was meant to be.

My interest in becoming a music therapist was sparked by my vocal teacher, who encouraged me to explore the field. She had seen how my passion for music and medicine went hand-in-hand, and encouraged me to watch a few TED Talks about music therapy. After watching these videos, I saw how deeply music therapy affects the lives of other people and felt like this was my calling.

To find out how to apply for the music therapy program, I called the University of Minnesota. Initially, they sent me information for the undergraduate program. However, this was not the correct information because I needed the master’s equivalency. Before I had my interview with the two professors in the program, I had the opportunity to talk to a student and ask some questions. The student that I talked to suggested that I ask the professor about their research, which I did at the end of the interview. The professor then told me that he felt a master’s equivalency program would be a better fit, which was what I thought I was interviewing for the entire time. In the end, everything worked out, and I was able to complete the master’s equivalency program to become a music therapist.

What is the career outlook for a healthcare assistant and music therapist?

There will always be a need for healthcare assistants, so I think this is a field that will always have a strong career outlook. Not only are healthcare assistants in high-demand, but there are also a wide variety of settings where they are needed.

On the music therapy side, I have high hopes for its career outlook. Currently, there are challenges because of funding and programs that are being cut. However, it is extremely beneficial when more people learn about the role of music therapists and are able to see its benefits. As music therapists, we work very hard to advocate and show people what music therapy can offer. I truly believe that more students are beginning to find out about music therapy sooner, therefore allowing them to pursue the field at a greater rate.

With whatever route you want to pursue in life, whether that’s being a music therapist or healthcare assistant, they are both extremely rewarding fields. However, one thing that I look forward to as a music therapist is getting to answer for myself and my clients, rather than being under the direction of other healthcare professionals.

How much education is required to become a healthcare assistant and music therapist?

The amount of education needed to become a healthcare assistant depends on what state you live in. Where I work at HCMC in Minnesota, we follow the homeroom program. This means that you can start working in the hospital in a role outside of healthcare, such as in the kitchen. From there, you can complete the homeroom program, where you learn to perform basic care for patients, such as taking vitals. You don’t necessarily need a certification for this. However, I think it is best to do the training and become certified.

To become certified, I attended a tech class for about one-to-two months, which was very short and simple. After the class, I had to take a test in order to prove that I could perform the basic patient care skills needed to be a nurse assistant. This test was all skill-based, and there was no written portion. In order to continue practicing as a nurse assistant, I just have to keep this certification on the Minnesota state registry. This is a very simple process requiring me to upload a copy of my W2 to show that I have been working as a healthcare assistant as well as where I have been working. You are required to work at least eight hours a year in order to keep your certification as a healthcare assistant.

To become a music therapist, more education is required, and there are a few avenues you can take to get this job. One option involves getting a four-year bachelor’s degree, followed by an internship where you have to acquire about 1200 patient care hours. Usually, an internship lasts about six months. My internship, however, was nine months long because I only went part-time. After the internship, you have to pass a board certification exam.

There are also other avenues to becoming a music therapist. Since I already had a bachelor’s degree, I completed the master’s equivalency to become a music therapist. This involves two years of in-person classes, followed by an internship, the certification exam, and your thesis.

What advice would you give to someone who is interested in the healthcare field and is trying to figure out what profession is best for them?

My biggest piece of advice is to take time to figure out what brings you joy in life and not focus on what is going to give you the biggest salary. At the end of the day, you can be very wealthy, but it is not worth it if you do not enjoy what you are doing. You shouldn’t just be working to get to the next vacation. It is really important to focus on what brings you joy at home and when you are surrounded by family and friends. As you decide what career you want to pursue, try to find a job that brings you joy every day. Personally, I want to be a music therapist because whenever I am home, I just want to be creative and help people reach their goals.

I would also say that it is perfectly fine to make changes in your career pathway. For example, there is nothing wrong with a nurse changing their mind and deciding to become a physician assistant. The healthcare field is wonderful because you can always change your mind and pursue a different specialty later on if you choose.