Tucked away on the back side of Senators Hall is a little-known gem of JSC: The Health Center. This is where the new Nurse Practitioner, Lori Koshowski, now spends a lot of her time. That is, when she is not instructing yoga classes at her studio, Kingdom Yoga, cooking up her latest creation with her husband in their café, or teaching her puppy new tricks.
Koshowski was born and raised in Canada, where she completed her undergraduate degree in nursing. She then moved to the U.S. where she became a travel nurse working in states such as Arizona, Montana, Vermont, New York and Pennsylvania. “You have three-month contract assignments,” explained Koshowski. “So you actually work for a company that will often get calls from hospitals who are short nursing staff, so you can be working in a different specialty every time. Someplace I went I worked in cardiology and another place I went I worked in neurology or ICU, it really depended what the need was.”
Koshowski worked as a travel nurse upwards of fifteen years before she decided to pursue a master’s degree at New York University (NYU). “So I actually have a dual degree in integrative medicine and primary care.” said Koshowski. Her other previous work includes the Corner Medical Hospital in Lyndonville, a short commute from her home in Glover.
Outside of nursing, Koshowski’s interests are broad. “I teach yoga,” she said. “I have my own yoga studio in Glover where I live, so that is another passion in my life. I love animals so I’m really into my Belgian Tervuren Shepherd. We work on agility and obedience and things like that. And I also love cooking; we [my husband and I] have a little café in Glover [Runaway Café]. So that’s enough. It keeps me busy.”
Koshowski became a nurse because she wanted to help people. That is why her favorite thing about her job is “being in primary care,” she said. “And having the opportunity to build relationships with your patients and watching some of the positive changes take place in their life. As a provider, I think one of your goals is to help people through whatever it is they are going through, those vulnerable moments in their life, and to see somebody come through and be on the other side of that.” This is why
Koshowski thinks that JSC is the perfect place for her: “I thought that it would be an interesting and exciting place to work. I also thought it would be great to work with this particular population.”
As the sole JSC nurse practitioner Koshowski gets to “do it all.”
“We see acute visits, we see scheduled patients, we work closely with the counseling department, we do outreach projects and we do have some lab testing here,” said Koshowski.
She also wants to remind students that that the clinic is open five days a week, Monday-Thursday 9a.m.-4p.m. and Friday 9a.m.-1p.m. “We welcome all questions and we are here to help in any way that we can, everything is confidential.”
