WESTMONT DOWNTOWN | GROTENHUIS NURSING

ABSN Dec. 2024 Pinning Ceremony

Sadie Hill Shares Her Story

It’s hard to believe that 16 months ago, this group didn’t even know each other. I think we can all agree that it’s been the fastest, yet simultaneously slowest, 16 months of our lives.

What’s so unique about this program is that none of us were 18 year olds showing up to our undergrad and deciding “sure I’ll major in nursing!” Instead, we all arrived here with a past, with an education, with prior careers and varying amounts of life experience. At some point along each of our journey’s, we made the intentional decision to pivot, or continue more schooling, and further our education to pursue nursing, which has led us to form Cohort 4!

To give you a sense of just how diverse and remarkable this group is: we have a business major, sociology majors, kinesiology and biology majors, an international relations major. We have a former teacher, social worker, medical research assistant, doula, athletes, fitness instructor, barista. We have people who commute to class from Camarillo all the way up to Slo.

We have mothers, husbands and wives and overall a group that has an incredibly impressive background. Despite all of this, each person sitting here had the desire to become a nurse, and sacrificed a whole lot to pursue that calling. Going to an accelerated post graduate nursing program is never the easy option in life, and I believe the fact that we all chose this option shows a level of commitment and dedication to nursing.

Although each of our stories are different, and our “why” is personal and unique, we all had a goal, and we all accomplished it! In these 16 months, we basically learned a new language that they call “nursing,” spent countless hours learning and practicing new skills, recording videos in the lab, experiencing the recurring trauma when a new semester started and knowing a medication math exam was on the horizon (in which we were required a 100% in order to pass, or else....), and waking up at ungodly hours to get to clinical.

Our communal stress and anxiety has brought us pretty close in a way anybody that goes, or went, to nursing school, or has done anything hard really, would understand.

Yet to me, the reason I find this group so connected is through the conversations and experiences around the reality of nursing. We have talked openly and extensively about the ethical implications we will face in our job, the difference between being cured and being healed, the inescapable nature of death, and simply the unfairness and injustice that coexists with pain and suffering.

While these are not exactly fun or easy conversations, these are the moments I have witnessed the character of our cohort, and seen just how good of people you are. We have been together as we’ve been exposed to the dark and broken nature of healthcare and the system it’s encompassed by, yet these are also the times we have seen each other be advocates, compassionate, bold, culturally aware and sensitive, seeking grace and truth.

I feel so connected to you because of this reason, far beyond the stress of an exam, but instead the collective experience of seeing a vulnerable side of humanity.

We have also gotten to experience new life brought into the world, see miraculous recoveries and watch healing happen in front of our own eyes. We’ve been able to be a small part of a patient’s support system, building relationships with them and their families. We’ve gotten to experience how death can be beautiful and peaceful. This has all opened our eyes to the true joy of nursing, and the hope it can instill within us.

My encouragement to all of us is to continue carrying these values with us as we enter this next season of our lives in our careers. May we continue to care deeply, speak up for the quality of care each and every patient deserves, and serve our community with kindness, empathy, and eagerness.

We are so fortunate to have gone to a nursing program that has facilitated these conversations and helped us build a framework to navigate these topics.

By attending a liberal arts nursing school, we gained a holistic perspective towards nursing, allowing us to dig deep into scary and hard topics, in order to care for patients in their entirety, and not be jaded by the complexity of the human experience.

This has not only been emphasized through our learning, but modeled through our instructors. I know I can speak for all of Cohort 4 when I say that our teachers have been role models, pouring their knowledge, wisdom and experience into us every single day for the past 16 months. They have taught us the nitty gritty textbook material, but they have also taken the time to teach us “real world nursing” in order to make sure we are well equipped to transition into our jobs.

Because of them, we are not only walking away with the basic facts, but with a deeper understanding of what it means to be an open minded, reflective and resilient nurse.

While there’s no doubt we still have so much to learn, and as we all know, nursing is a career of lifelong learning anyways, I want to acknowledge and celebrate just how much we’ve grown and evolved. To think about where we started, most of us with little to no hospital experience, where skills like changing the hospital bed linens and counting respirations were a daunting task, to see each of us now exuding confidence in settings that seemed so overwhelming at the beginning. We’re passing medications on multiple patients, we’re challenging medication orders from the pharmacist and doctors, we’re dissecting and applying protocols to ensure the safety of our patients, and we’re even starting IVs on a patient during a code. We’re also doing things most people would vomit at the thought of... so I’ll spare you the details.

We are not experts or professionals yet by any means, but we are critical thinkers, active learners, and ambitious future nurses.

With this energy and yearning, we have the opportunity, and responsibility, to go out into our jobs with these qualities in order to impact the culture and standard of care. We all have college degrees, we all definitely could have found a different job that didn’t require more schooling for an additional degree, but we chose nursing. We want this career, we have a passion and calling for it and now we’re at the point where we get to go do it.

I also want to take a moment to thank every family member, friend and support system out here that has allowed each of us to make this sacrifice and be pretty much out of commission as a functioning hum for the last 16 months. Without this constant encouragement I actually don’t know how we could have made it.

Cohort 4- I am so proud of us, and I am inspired by each of you and your work ethic, your drive, your humor, your determination and your grit.

I can honestly say that if one of my family members were in the hospital I would feel beyond lucky, and confident, to have any one of you as the nurse. I hope we can hold on to the enthusiasm that has gotten us here, and allow it to continue pushing us to do hard things as we keep moving through life. I’m so proud of you guys and I can’t wait to see the fruit of our labor flourish through the lives we can impact, the patients we can pour into, and ultimately the way we will be transformed through the hard, but also beautiful and incredibly rewarding career as nurses.