Motivated by traumatic experience of her own, Northwest student completes therapeutic rec program with aim to help others

A few summers ago, Anna Moloney was a new college graduate gearing up for a teaching career. This summer, she graduated from Northwest Missouri State University with a master’s degree, and the outlook she has for her career is much different.

“I feel so backed and supported – like, ‘Wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing, we’re here for you,’” Moloney says of her student experience at Northwest. “It feels like you’re a person, not just a student.”

This month, Moloney, who resides in Costa Rica, completed her master’s degree in therapeutic recreation through Northwest Online.

She capped her coursework with a summer internship at Bethany Children’s Health Center, a pediatric rehabilitation hospital in Oklahoma that further solidified her decision to enter the therapeutic rec field. She worked in a range of care programs, from practicing developmental play with infants and toddlers to assisting teenagers heal from major surgeries or traumatic injuries caused by viruses, car crashes and gunshots.

Moloney was part of a therapy staff that used games, art, technology and other forms of recreation to help their young patients do things that people outside of the hospital setting often take for granted – such as walking or lifting an arm.

One teenager with a brain injury had difficulty standing up and walking during physical traditional therapy sessions, Moloney recalled.

“And then he’d come to our therapy and we’d be playing Wii sports, and he would be standing up to play,” she said. “For him, it was just fun, and we were able to tackle a lot of those things that other therapies wanted to be doing. Because it was rec and it was fun, it was able to help him go home and do all those things that he needs to do.”

After all, it was a traumatic experience of her own that led Moloney to Northwest.

In 2021, Moloney completed her bachelor’s degree in special education at a different university but realized during her student teaching that being a schoolteacher was not the career path she wanted. Her passion for outdoor recreation has never ceased, though, and she went to work that summer as a guide at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

“I went there thinking it was my last big summer adventure before I started my professional life, and it turned into a summer of questioning a lot of things and what I wanted to do,” she said.

During her last days as a guide at Grand Teton, Moloney planned one more adventure, which ended horribly. With her sister and a friend who also were working as guides, it had been a goal of theirs to summit Mount Owen – the second-highest peak in the park at nearly 13,000 feet – before the end of the summer. They climbed the mountain successfully in eight hours, but the trek down was hurried by an approaching storm. The group tried taking a faster route down the mountain and came to a glacier.

Trailing her partners who navigated it successfully, Moloney slid from the ice and was tossed into a canyon to tumble down the rocky landscape. Her Garmin watch tracked the speed of her fall at 37 mph.

The fall left her with cuts, fractures and a brain injury. She also landed in an area where rescuers could not immediately reach her – which meant Moloney and her companions had little choice but to carry out a self-rescue during the ensuing 17 hours.

As she recovered from the ordeal, physically and mentally, Moloney felt a pull to pursue recreational therapy. She found Northwest during an internet search of potential programs and applied because it was one of the few universities that checked the boxes she wanted to fill for a master’s degree experience.

With the help of a scholarship from her employer, she began her coursework through Northwest Online that fall.

Having lived through the trauma of her accident, Moloney quickly connected with course concepts and fundamentals of emotional, social, cognitive and physical health, with an interest in helping others maximize their quality of life.

“I think being in rec therapy and studying it afterward really helped me,” Moloney said. “That experience – and now being a rec therapist – set me up to also help my patients because of my understanding of what it feels like.”

Moloney appreciated the ways Northwest’s online program offered her flexibility and freedom to explore her interests in therapeutic recreation – while applying things she was learning in her coursework.

One project that left a lasting impact on Moloney tasked students with identifying and analyzing recreational therapy programs in their respective locales. Moloney studied Special Olympics, an art program, and Pure Life Adventure, a therapy program for struggling adolescents and young adults. The latter led to an initial invitation to join the program as a guide for six months, but Moloney continued as a guide for two years while pursuing her master’s degree.

Additionally, Pure Life gave her opportunities to teach surfing and lead rafting and backpacking experiences.

“(Northwest) provided the flexibility to be able to do so much more experiential learning than I would have had if I was on campus,” she said. “It really was, for me, the perfect fit.”

Now, with her master's degree program complete, Moloney hopes to establish a rec therapy program in Costa Rica. She is grateful for the ways Northwest faculty supported her goals throughout the degree program – not just within her coursework but by providing resources and helping her develop connections that will last long after her graduation.