Meet Geneva

Living Her Best Life

END was the beginning for Geneva Duncan

Geneva Duncan loves waking up in the morning. Each day, she faces challenging work in a field she loves. She makes good money and hasn’t even graduated from college yet.

Duncan will be the first to tell you she is living the dream.

Duncan, a student in the electroneurodiagnostics (END) program at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C®), will graduate in May with her associate degree. When she started the program, she had never heard of electroneurodiagnostics — she could barely even say it. Now, she’s an END technologist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

“We are looking at brain waves constantly,” Duncan, 37, said.

That’s the work of an END technician: brain electricity. She runs EEG and nerve conduction studies, checks people for seizures, and monitors sleep patterns.

“Once I got in the program and started meeting the professors, I fell in love with it,” Duncan, 37, said. “The professors help you so much, and they want to see you do well. I have been in other programs before, and I have never seen one quite like ours.”

No one could have predicted Duncan’s trajectory. At the end of 2021, she couldn’t even think about a trajectory. She lost both her parents to COVID that year — her dad on Christmas Eve and her mom on New Year’s Eve.

Duncan was grieving, spending her days at a job she didn’t care about and the rest of her time taking care of her special-needs son.

“I was in a bad place. I felt like I needed somewhere to put my time,” Duncan said.

Around this time, she heard about END from one of her fiance’s colleagues. Intrigued, she thought it might be a good way to get out of her own head and onto a path that could eventually bear fruit. She did her research, and by 2022, she was enrolled in the Tri-C program.

“There is a welcoming environment with this program. It’s a small program, and everybody knows you. You are not just a number. That’s something people say a lot, but it’s true with this program,” Duncan said. “I can’t speak highly enough about it.”

Tri-C offers two END tracks: general and polysomnography. Duncan chose polysomnography, the study of sleep patterns.

At one point during her studies, Duncan was the subject of a sleep study of her own. In a hospital gown and chatting with the attending, she mentioned that she was in the END program at Tri-C.

“The lady was like, ‘Apply here! We love Tri-C students,’” Duncan said. She described herself as a highly sought-after candidate in the field. She started clinicals during her second semester.

“When I graduate, I could sit for boards and work as an EEG tech,” she said. “And after a couple more classes, I could do nerve conductions.”

But she plans to sit for her boards and stay at the VA hospital because Duncan loves what she is already doing, and it can only get better.

“Tri-C’s END program is amazing,” she said. “It literally changed my life. People say I am so much happier. They see me smiling.”