She has spearheaded the establishment of an affiliation agreement with a multi-state hospital system to incentivize their employees to choose OKWU when returning to school, and she cares for currently enrolled students through dedicated servant leadership.
Innovatively Building on Strengths
When Mangimela stepped into her current role in January of 2024, she assumed leadership of a well-developed and impressive program that had an established track record of training highly competent nurses at all levels. The undergraduate nursing program—for students who have not yet earned nursing licenses—is offered in the traditional, on-campus setting; students in this program earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree, then take the NCLEX nursing licensure exam to become registered nurses (RNs). By contrast, the fully online degree programs that Mangimela oversees are designed to meet the needs of licensed, working nurses who wish to advance their academic studies. For RNs who have not completed a bachelor’s degree, OKWU offers the RN to BSN program. Nurses who wish to pursue advanced degrees may earn Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) and Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degrees at OKWU. Mangimela says that licensed nurses return to school for many reasons—they may want to grow in their jobs, they may have taken on leadership roles, or they may want to become educators themselves.
OKWU is a small school that has received big recognition; its nursing program is ranked at number three in Oklahoma by RegisteredNursing.org; the same site ranked OKWU’s MSN program at number two in the state. Even more impressively, OKWU’s BSN students often achieve an astounding 100 percent first-time pass rate each year for all students taking the NCLEX-RN licensure exam. Additionally, OKWU was one of the first universities to move its RN to BSN program fully online, making attendance much more accessible for the working adults they serve.
Rosa Ketchum (DNP), associate dean of nursing and associate professor of nursing at OKWU, states that Mangimela has been quite innovative in finding ways to improve the current program. One such change that Mangimela has overseen in her short time on the job is the updating and re-vamping of the RN to BSN program so that it can now be completed in one year. She also worked with campus stakeholders to drop the cost to $299 per credit hour. While the restructuring makes the program even more accessible for the target student population, Mangimela notes that each change creates a cascade of downstream details that must be meticulously addressed. For example, information about the new degree pathway must be consistent across internal and public-facing documentation, and information about the new hourly cost must be updated on all relevant campus web pages and in all student and internal campus communications.
Now that Mangimela has taken care of those details, she is working to more effectively market OKWU’s graduate nursing programs. While these degree programs consistently receive accolades, the school has experienced challenges communicating their strengths to the general public and leveraging their achievements to drive increased enrollments. Toward that end, Mangimela has been learning marketing strategies on the job because—as a career nurse—she has never taken a business class. She jokes that her only previous marketing experience was creating a business card and sign for her dad’s business when she was a tween. OKWU’s marketing professionals have helped Mangimela grapple with a familiar challenge for small private institutions: how to communicate their programs’ strengths and values as they compete with better-funded competitors. Mangimela and the in-house marketing team are working together to identify less-costly publicity options, such as maintaining ongoing connections with OKWU’s nursing graduates. An additional challenge is that students in the programs that Mangimela oversees range in age from 20 to 60, so they can’t simply rely on the types of social media engagements that work well to attract traditional students entering college directly from high school.
One innovative idea they have acted on was to have OKWU’s in-house creative team conduct an alum photo shoot so that images and testimonials from real students can be posted on their website. They also aim to develop stronger ongoing ties with program graduates, so Mangimela is now developing a regular newsletter to go to OKWU’s nursing graduates. This regular communication will keep OKWU front of mind for alums, so they will be more likely to recommend the program to people they know and choose the program themselves when they return to school.
Ketchum appreciates that when Mangimela sees a problem, she “has to tackle it.” One next step for Mangimela in developing graduate nursing studies is to seek grant funding for a departmental program to help students find and secure additional loan and grant money to fund their degrees, Ketchum says.
Developing Creative Partnerships
With the wholehearted support of the provost and Associate Dean Ketchum, Mangimela has looked beyond OKWU’s campus to find additional creative ways of drawing students to OKWU’s graduate nursing program. One exciting avenue for developing off-campus partnerships is through affiliation agreements.
The first such agreement came about through multiple strong connections between OKWU and a local hospital employee. Shelly Bauer (DNP), director of Clinical and Professional Education at Hillcrest Hospital South, frequently interacts with OKWU faculty. Hillcrest, part of the Ardent Hospital System, is an acute care facility where OKWU students can complete practicum hours. Bauer first met Mangimela while earning her DNP at OKWU, and once Bauer graduated with her DNP in 2023, Mangimela and Ketchum asked her to pick up a few classes as an OKWU adjunct.
Given the strong ties between OKWU and Hillcrest, Mangimela had an idea to build on those connections. Ardent employees can earn three credentials certified by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC); one of these is the Practice Transition Accreditation Program (PTAP). According to Bauer, this accreditation was created to help new nurses transition successfully into professional practice. Mangimela thought that nurses who had earned the PTAP certification might be able to receive credit for it in their online studies at OKWU. According to Bauer, Mangimela “did her magic,” meeting with OKWU stakeholders to make the change. The provost wholeheartedly endorsed the idea, and Mangimela worked out the details with OKWU’s business office.
Beginning in the fall of 2025, students in OKWU’s RN-BSN, MSN, and DNP programs will receive academic or assignment credit for the PTAP certification.
What’s more is that this benefit is not limited to Oklahoma. Since OKWU’s graduate nursing degrees are all offered 100 percent online, nurses working at any of Ardent’s hospitals in five states can take advantage of this benefit. This arrangement means that Ardent’s employees have an incentive to attend OKWU when they want to pursue additional degrees, and they have the ability to do so because of the virtual access.
Connecting with Students
Mangimela’s role as director of Graduate Nursing Programs goes far beyond administrative development; in addition to her teaching and service responsibilities, she also strives to meet the needs of each individual student in her classes and in the program as a whole. Mangimela sees maintaining personal touches with students as both service and as an ongoing marketing and retention strategy. She regularly meets with students one-on-one to talk through any challenges they’re facing, and she also meets with each student cohort once per term.
Angela Angel (DNP), clinical instructor at the SoutheastHEALTH College of Nursing and Health Sciences, describes Mangimela as exemplifying servant leadership, continually looking for ways to serve those around her and thereby lead. As a student in the DNP program, Angel appreciated Mangimela’s encouraging and empathetic nature as well as the way she also exemplifies the skills she teaches. Mangimela makes clear to her students that she wants them to go far beyond simply passing their classes; instead, she wants them to understand the reasons why they are learning the content.
As Ketchum says, a large part of Mangimela’s job lies in serving students in the MSN and DNP degree programs as chair of their project courses. These individual practicum courses ask each graduate nursing student to implement a quality-improvement project in a healthcare setting. One example that Ketchum describes is a recent doctoral student who worked with Canadian race car drivers who had experienced hand injuries. Ketchum observes that Mangimela’s background in living and working overseas—as well as her experience earning her MSN while abroad—gives her a special connection with students who are working on their degrees internationally. Mangimela’s own rich and varied experiences working in China and Zambia and earning her own advanced degrees while living overseas means that she can offer practical guidance for students working in other cultural settings, as well. She even teaches a course on transcultural nursing.
Angel notes that she and Mangimela share the identity of “Kingdom nurses”—nurses who strive to enact their Christian values in their professional practices. OKWU promotes this approach, in which nurses aim to embody values such as love, kindness, and patience in order to “promote good working relationships with co-workers and patients,” as Angel explains.
P.J. Hopkins (DNP), chief nursing officer at Wound Care of Wyoming and former student of Mangimela’s, particularly appreciates being able to attend OKWU completely online. She is a working nurse, and her husband—a disabled veteran—needs a great deal of medical care. Hopkins says she was able to complete her course work on her laptop wherever she was—submitting class assignments, conducting research, and writing papers. When she needed help, she could text or email Mangimela at any time; she says that Mangimela showed her trademark care for students by responding quickly, answering questions, and offering helpful suggestions.
Hopkins says she felt even more connected to Mangimela after they were both accepted to present posters at the annual Oklahoma Nurse Association convention. As part of the program’s professionalization practices, each DNP student is required to send a presentation proposal to a nursing organization; both Hopkins and Mangimela were among the 15 chosen last year. While Hopkins felt she had gotten to know Mangimela fairly well via email, phone, and virtual meetings in the DNP program, she appreciated the opportunity to work with her in a different capacity.
Mangimela describes herself as a “work horse” who can take care of details, and others note her nature as a servant leader, but she also notes the practical side of striving to serve OKWU’s students well on every level: graduates who have had a good experience at OKWU will keep coming back for additional degrees. She continually seeks ways to make her classes and the programs she oversees ever more effective and accessible, all in service of the working nurse professionals who care for the public daily.
