An Auburn native, Brian Clay Young graduated from AUSON with a bachelor’s degree in 1996 and completed the dual-track master’s program for Primary Nurse Practitioner and Nursing Educator in 2018.
Young started teaching at the nursing school on Feb. 1, 2021. He had previously served as a clinical associate for a year in Sep. 2018 at AUSON. During that time, he was clinical instructor for students at Wellstar West Georgia Medical Center in critical care and leadership. He spent most of his career as an ER nurse. Prior to moving back to the Auburn area to attend graduate school in 2016, Young worked in the ER at Northside Hospital in Atlanta for 15 years with intermittent travel assignments in northern California. While in graduate school at AU, he worked as a home health nurse for Encompass Home Health and Hospice from 2016 to 2019. He has also served as a nurse practitioner at Nexus Pain Center in Columbus, Georgia.
At AUSON, Young will be teaching Professional Nursing Concepts III (Care of chronic and complex conditions across the lifespan with chronic and/or complex neurosensory and neuromuscular alterations).
“Critical care nurses have to process vast amounts of information and require well developed critical-thinking skills to make clinical decisions,” he said. “I want each of my students to have a comprehensive understanding of material so that they enter the critical care setting prepared to help patients with life-threatening problems.”
According to Young, three of the biggest trends in nursing education are cased-based learning (CBL), use of simulation, and interdisciplinary education. “I do have an interest in educational research strategies in the teaching-learning process and outcomes at all levels of nursing education. I believe that it is necessary to use multimodal teaching methods to reach my students. Students have different learning styles, and you must be able to connect with each student for them to be successful. My goal is to facilitate the attainment of knowledge by providing students with information that can be used in conjunction with their own experiences to construct new knowledge.”
“The philosophy that guides my personal life is challenging myself on a consistent basis and never fear failure. When you put yourself on the line, you realize that you can and have to perform. This is essential for personal and professional growth,” he said.
Young lives in Opelika with his wife Christy, son Bo, and two dogs Chaucer and Soap. We welcome the Young family to the AUSON Family.
