First-year PA student earns full ride from National Health Service Corps

By Chuck Gordon

Not everyone knows during their undergraduate days exactly what career they want to pursue. John Barri had to get away from home for a little bit to figure it out.

After graduating from East Carolina University in 2016, Barri, now a first-year student in Wingate University's physician assistant studies program, headed west, working in Keystone, Colo., for a few years as a property manager at a ski resort. He'd moved away from North Carolina out of a sense of adventure and curiosity.

"I feel like a lot of personal growth and maturity happened over those five or six years I worked there," he says. "I spent a lot of time reflecting and looking forward to not only who I want to be but how I want to contribute to society."

It turns out that he really wanted to pursue medicine, specifically providing healthcare to people in lower-income areas. Barri will get a chance to do just that in a couple of years. He recently found out that he was one of a little over 5 percent of applicants to earn a full scholarship from the National Health Service Corps.

The scholarship, which was awarded to 172 of 3,181 eligible applicants, covers tuition, fees and living expenses in exchange for a commitment to serve in an underserved community after graduation.

Barri is studying on Wingate's Hendersonville campus, and he can envision staying in western North Carolina after his graduation in 2027. Barri says that hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to the Virginia/Maryland border a few years ago - "1,025 miles on the dot" - gave him a strong affinity for the North Carolina mountains and its people.

"I just really like the small mountain communities," he says. "Seeing how geographic isolation can affect access to good healthcare, if I can improve that as a PA, that's what I want to do."

Barri, who grew up in Wilmington, N.C., spent a few years in Greensboro in a postbaccalaureate program to accumulate the necessary prerequisite credits to apply to PA school, while also working as a medical assistant and as a certified nursing assistant in order to gain some experience.

Wingate had been one of the first PA schools he'd contacted when he realized he wanted to switch careers, and Barri says the department "really took me seriously as a student and a potential candidate." That personal touch and the mountain setting - near the Pisgah National Forest, where he used to go camping as a child - sold him on the program.

Once he'd been accepted, Barri started looking into ways to both offset the cost of graduate school and serve populations in need. His father, Dr. Michael Barri, had spent time working on an Indian reservation in Wyoming to help defray the cost of his education, and Barri was inspired to find a similar program.

He was flabbergasted when told he'd been awarded the NHSC scholarship.

"I had to pinch myself," he says. "I was honestly taken aback. It was kind of like, 'How did I pull this off?'"

Before moving back to North Carolina, Barri worked for a few months in a low-income nursing home in Colorado. The experience helped solidify his plans to provide healthcare to the less fortunate.

"It's where I can have the biggest impact as a PA," Barri says. "I think the challenge is appealing. When I worked at the nursing home in Colorado, I enjoyed building relationships with the patients. I think it's something I was good at and made me feel fulfilled as a person."

The NHSC program is designed to attract medical-care providers to areas that often have little choice in healthcare.

"Not worrying about the burden of loans, not worrying about getting the most competitive salary and compensation package, not having to make those payments opens up so many opportunities to work in those areas I want to be in," Barri says.

Oct. 11, 2025