Pam Colyar and Diane Wollam
TCC Nursing Alumni
We studied hard, worked hard, played hard."
Sometimes you’re lucky enough to join a group of forever friends without realizing it at the time. That’s what happened to seven TCC Nursing students who formed a study group when their nursing program started in the fall of 1987. Pam Colyar and Diane Wollam are two of those students, and they shared their TCC stories together – Colyar during a visit to campus, and Wollam remotely, from her home in Michigan.
When she started the TCC Associate of Nursing program, Wollam was living on base at Fort Lewis. She’d started nursing school at a “diploma program” (a three-year program aligned with a hospital) in Michigan, and then taken a ten-year break. She decided to brush up on prerequisites the summer before the program started, but found it rough going.
“Before class had even started, the professor said, ‘I’m not going to review this, because we went over it last semester.’ And I wanted to cry, because my last semester was ten years ago,” Wollam recalled.
She told the instructor, Tim Keeley, that she didn’t think she could do it.
“If it hadn’t been for him talking me off the ledge, I wouldn’t have made it,” Wollam said.
Wollam had been scheduled to transfer into the Tacoma General program when she moved to Washington, but she got pregnant. She started the TCC program when her son was ten.
“Nobody tells you, not everybody has to get an A,” Wollam noted. “I was working part time, going to school full time, and sometimes my husband would be gone for two to three months at a time. Nobody cares what your grades were.”
“That’s why we needed the study group,” Colyar agreed. “We were all so busy. We’d ask each other questions we thought would be on the test.”
Colyar is a local. She attended St. Leo’s in Tacoma and graduated from Yelm High School, and two of her aunts had trained in nursing at Tacoma General.
Colyar got her LPN at Clover Park Technical college, but she also ended up delaying her entry into an Associates in Nursing program due to pregnancy. She was initially accepted to TCC in 1972, and she was accepted when she applied again in 1987.
“Both times they accepted 50 out of more than 500 applicants,” Colyar said. “I have my very first acceptance letter, from way back in ’72.”
For Wollam, the toughest class to get through was pharmacology.
“We made up a lot of rhymes, like ‘gonna end it all with Enderall’,” she recalled.
For Colyar, it was psychology.
“I had worked in psychiatric nursing as an LPN, and my worst grade was the psych final. I went by real life, which was not the answer.”
Money was tight for both women, and they received scholarships.
“My husband was in the military, so we didn’t make any money at all,” Wollam recalled. “I received a scholarship from the Jewish Women’s Society. I said, ‘But, ma’am, you know I’m not Jewish, right?’ She said, ‘That’s OK’.”
Colyar received a small scholarship from her credit union, and put the rest of her tuition on her credit card.
“That was crazy, but I was determined. I went to school knowing I was gonna have to support my kids (he’s now my ex-husband),” Colyar said. “They begged me not to go back to school – mom, please! Why aren’t you done with your homework before you’re done with ours?”
Colyar’s house was centrally located, and it became the go-to meeting spot for the nursing study group.
“We’d go to Lisa’s, too,” Wollam recalled. “It depended on who was going to be there and whose husband was not going to be around.”
Colyar said that the TCC nursing faculty found ways to support the students who were parenting (and often working) as well as going to school full time.
“I did not know what was going on in my family, much less the world,” Colyar said of that hectic time.
But despite their workload, 45 of the 50 members of Colyar and Wollam’s nursing cohort made it to graduation.
“Our study group, we made sure everybody made it,” Wollam said.
TCC didn’t have a nursing pinning ceremony back then, but the nursing cohort had a “capping” ceremony. Everyone from the study group also attended the TCC graduation, though it was a close call for Lisa, who had gone into labor the day before.
“I was up all night at the hospital with her, delivering the baby,” Wollam recalled. “Then she wanted to do graduation, and we begged, and the doctor made me be responsible for her. I took her wheelchair up to the stage, she walked across it, and I took her back to the hospital.”
Colyar remembers that another classmate, Sharon, developed cardiac symptoms during the cohort’s cardiac exam and was taken away in an ambulance. But Sharon made it to graduation, too.
Colyar’s kids were happy for their mom, and proud that she’d graduated. But they asked her to be done with school. She earned a Parish Nursing certification from PLU, and she volunteers as a parish nurse to this day. Through parish nursing (now known as faith community nursing), she mentored a woman who was in a shelter and got her into a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) program. The woman earned her RN degree in September of 2024, and sent Colyar a ticket to attend her graduation.
“I baptize kids, too, if they need it. I do what needs to be done.”
Aside from parish nursing, Colyar’s career didn’t go quite as she’d planned. She was injured by a patient about a year after she graduated, and ended up working in an administrative role for the State of Washington.
“I go the job based on experience, not education,” said Colyar. “It took the supervisor three weeks to write up why she wanted me. I couldn’t believe I was running Medicare programs for the state – I did that for 16 years.”
Wollam took her education as far as she could, ending up with a Doctorate of Nursing Practice. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in 1996, and then she decided she wanted to teach.
“Then I wanted to argue with Congress – and I asked myself, would they listen to Diane Wollam or Dr. Wollam better? So I went back,” Wollam said. “Other people listen, but Congress hasn’t listened yet,” she added.
“Diane is good at talking, she’ll tell ‘em!” Colyar said.
In her nursing practice, Wollam has worked in numerous locations, including Germany. But regardless of her location, she’s spent most of her time in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
“I was everything from a staff nurse to a charge nurse to ICU Manager to Administrator of Nursing to Clinical IT Manager. I said, I’m a nurse, I’m not an IT professional… they said, ‘well, now you are’!” Wollam recalled. “Nursing is such a great career,” she added. “There are so many things you can do. What I don’t understand is how some of these people can get into it and then decide that they don’t like it. Don’t quit being a nurse – instead, ask yourself, what else do you like to do? Go into clinical IT or something. You can teach, you can be in pediatrics, parish, community – it gives you such versatility. You just have to find the right seat on the bus.”
During the pandemic, Wollam was the Administrative Director of Nursing at her organization. They ended up with so many patients that she had to figure out ways to streamline charting.
“We had the first patient that passed away in the city, and I was the admin on call when he came in,” said Wollam. My life totally changed that March – though I didn’t get Covid until it was all over.”
The career trajectories of the study group’s members gives a glimpse into just how much you can do with a degree in nursing. Labor and delivery, postpartum care, missionary nurse, nursing home director, hospice care, cath lab management, physician’s group management, even a move to veterinary medicine – the group has done it all. Over the years, the group has stayed in touch mostly via phone – and they did lose touch for a while, when their lives were extra busy.
“It takes the person who lives furthest away to get everyone who lives closest together, together,” said Wollam, who moved back to the Midwest. “I was a little jealous that I was the one who moved away. Ten years ago I said, come on, we need to do a reunion.”
“Diane’s the glue,” said Colyar.
“I’m the instigator. I always have been,” agreed Wollam.
The women agreed that when the group got back together, they found that they were still friends; there was no awkwardness. Now, they meet about once per year. They’re looking for a good place to stay in Tacoma so they can attend TCC’s Sept. 27 Open House together.
So far, Colyar is the only one who’s toured the new Harned Center for Health Careers. The new building provides a worthy setting for TCC’s nursing program; students used to train Building 19, which was built to resemble the campuses’ original one-story, fieldstone-clad buildings. Despite its unfancy setting, though, the women agreed that TCC’s nursing program left them well prepared for what was to come.
“At TCC, we had clinicals, and we also had the classwork. We did everything, the entire body. Now everything’s so segmented – I don’t think I could do it that way,” Wollam said.
Wollam would like to see current nursing students get more hands-on training. “Their clinicals aren’t as lengthy. That’s my impression.”
The women agreed that the computer aspect of nursing is probably the biggest adjustment their profession has had to make, especially the move from paper-based to computer-based records management systems. “The simplest ones are best,” Wollam said. “The computer is only as good as what you put in.”
“I do know of several nurses that, once the paperwork got that bad, they quit nursing,” added Colyar. “The increased paperwork and use of computers means less time for patient care.”
In nursing school and beyond, all seven members of the study group have done incredible work. But they’ve always known how to balance work with fun. Colyar recalls a time when someone brought a boom box to class, and everyone was singing and dancing along to a Beach Boys tune.
“That was our group theme song, though we didn’t have much time for parties until we were done.” Wollam agreed. “We studied hard, worked hard, played hard.”