School of Nursing

B.S. in Nursing

Class of 2008

"I work as a trauma nurse practitioner and trauma critical care surgery is my specialty, so I care for anybody that either undergoes emergency surgery, recovery from surgery, car accidents, shootings, stabbings, falls.

When I was going to school for nursing at the University of Delaware, I kind of thought that I’d be interested in shock trauma or emergency care. I really liked that adrenaline rush. My ‘ah-ha’ moment was probably senior year when I was doing my senior preceptorship where they pair you with a registered nurse and you do 80 to 100 hours in a certain specialty. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to the surgical ICU here at Christiana Hospital. I loved my preceptor that I worked with, I loved what we were doing, and I got to see a whole bunch of crazy things and do some crazy hands-on things. After I graduated, they hired me as my first nursing job into the critical care internship. I actually ended up working in that unit for nine years, so it was pretty much my ‘ah-ha’ - this is what I want to do kind of moment.

The reason I chose UD, and the thing I liked most about it, was that they start you off in their nursing program right away, freshman year. You look at other schools and you have to do two years of prerequisites and then apply to the nursing program. At UD, you’re with your group of students and friends, and with the professors starting from year one. I thought that was a really good selling point for me on UD and also it was a challenging nursing school. It was not easy whatsoever.

I’m also now a clinical instructor for UD. Part-time, I teach medsurg 1 and medsurg 2. The students come out to Christiana every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for a rotation. I teach them on one of the surgical step-down units. They are seniors getting ready to go out into the real world, so it’s pretty cool to kind of come full circle and see them. I have to remember that they’re babies in there. They’re new and they’re not very good at hands-on experience, but at the same time, it’s kind of cool to see what I probably looked like years ago when I was a senior nursing student at UD."