Shauna LaMagna is an assistant professor at Montgomery Community College, Southeastern Pennsylvania in the medical assisting department. She has 20 years of teaching experience and has also worked at Methodist Hospital in South Philadelphia in varying departments.
Her interest in pursuing a Masters of Arts in Health Law and Policy was sparked after she was asked to join the union negotiating team as a faculty representative from the health sciences division at Montgomery Community College.
“We went through a contract negotiation and as always health care benefits was a big topic of conversation. I was heavily involved in that conversation and I loved diving into the legal aspects of health care benefits. I even started to enjoy the contract conversations, legal terms, and the legal interpretation of contracts.”
Shortly after this she received an email about Hofstra Law’s Online Health Law Program for non-lawyers and saw it as a way to expand her knowledge base and pass it on to her students.
Think Like a Lawyer
Hofstra Law’s Masters of Arts in Health Law and Policy Program teaches the non-lawyer to think as if they were a lawyer. Prior to entering the program Shauna had very little experience in law but the introductory classes gave her the confidence she needed to succeed.
“Having professors like Professor Colombo really take the time and explain things in a way that were easy to understand as well as making it so accessible to us, really made me feel like I could do this and it was absolutely a good thing that I was doing.”
Her first few classes focused on important law basics such as statutory interpretation, history on the constitution, and case law. The knowledge that she gained from the classes helped her to broaden her understanding and allowed her to “participate in higher level discussions on what’s going on in the health law field.”
Strong Support System
For Shauna, the support she received from her professors as well as her academic advisor made all the difference.
“My advisor reached out to me on a very regular basis. Especially at registration time,” she says. “There was a certain point where I had to take a small break. I had the academic plan of how I was going to do it and something came up and I had to deviate from the plan a little bit. She was right there giving me alternatives and working with me and I still finished.”
Advancing Her Career
Since graduating from the program Shauna has been working on creating an open educational resources website for professors and students to use to learn more about topics in health law. Some of the topics included focus on issues in transgender health law, vaccine mandates, and whistleblowers in health care.
She also plans on using her MA in Health Law and Policy to assist her with an upcoming promotion where she currently works and is even thinking about the possibility of continuing further in the legal field.
“The program planted a bug in my ear about maybe going on and getting a JD and becoming a full fledge lawyer is something that could be in my future. I’d never would have considered that before,” she says. “Just having the joy of saying ‘oh my gosh this is a possibility and this is a path that I could follow’ that was the best part about it, that it gave me the confidence to say ‘I could do this.’”
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