I've always been in and out of nursing school, kind of wanting to do this career, and there's just been a little, you know, speed bumps in the way.

I was, I've been a medic now for 10 years, and I said, you know what, Excelsior has that paramedic to RN program and why not execute it, so… and I said, you know what, there's more opportunity in nursing, unfortunately, than there is in EMS. Like with EMS we can only really either become a field supervisor or some other sort of admin where with nursing, there's so many options. I could go into the OR, I could go to the ER, I could go into hospice, I could go into home care. Like there's so many options as a nurse that I don't have right now as a paramedic.

One of the nice things about Excelsior's nursing program is that we, like the LPNs and the paramedics, we get to use our real-life work experience that we're doing every single day as our clinical.

Obviously once we get to the end of our program, we have actual days where we go up to a different hospital and do our, you know, certain amount of hours of time. But being able to do this in the field now is nice.

I, I'm working. Like this is my clinical. I don't need to have that extra clinical until like the last, you know, two classes, so I'm doing the IVs. I'm passing meds. I'm putting these people on the cardiac monitor.

I'm doing the more advanced things that I feel nurses in the ER or ICU or etc. would be doing where I wouldn't be getting that same experience if I was still at that other, like another school. And doing still just the very basic mundane tasks of nursing. I know they're important, but it's nice being able to work and use my work experience as my clinical.

I don't, I feel very motivated just by the fact that I know that there's an end goal coming, I guess, and I know that the future is going to be brighter and there's gonna be more options.

And, you know, my kids definitely play a role in that. They love seeing me on the ambulance and as a paramedic, but I know that as a nurse too, they're gonna really love that and be like, oh, Mommy's, you know, at the hospital today, or she's, you know, here today.

I like to treat almost every patient like they're family, you know, so you go in, big smile, be like, oh, "What's going on today?" You know, like, "How you feeling?"

I, I want to be that presence to them that's, you know, welcoming. I want to, you know, tell them who I am, tell them what I'm doing, and give them the best care that I can, you know, even if that is just holding their hand, cause some people that's all they need is a hand to hold because they're having the worst day ever, you know, literally.

I feel prepared, but at the same time I'm still learning a lot with every class that I've been taking.

Obviously, I know the beginning parts or like the very emergent parts of everything, but I need to know more the long term, so that's what I've been learning while in school.