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Patel had good reason to stay at the bank. BofA
continued to give her benefits and issued her
stock options. The company reimbursed $2,000 a
year in tuition fees, as well as paid for her
to continue training at the bank. When work was
slow, she was allowed to study. As another perk,
she was given a parking pass for the bank’s
garage adjacent to the medical center.
Occasionally, work and school overlapped. “Some
customers came in with splints or shunts and I
knew what was wrong with them,” she said.
Her customer service skills, honed from four years
of working at the bank, help her with her bedside
manner, too. “Working has taught me great
customer service, and that will help me as a nurse,”
she said. “I was also able to finish school
without being left [in] debt.”
Elisabeth Hamel, RN, PhD, associate dean of health
professions at Grossmont College in El Cajon,
Calif., said she is seeing more such career jumps,
especially among the students in her night and
weekend associate degree program, where the students
are usually older.
“People come from all walks of life now,”
she said. “They have life experiences, and
I think that’s what makes them so good.”
One of her students, Ian Davidson, kept his job
as a stockbroker through school. In his case,
a consistent work schedule rather than a flexible
one made school possible. He works the hours of
the financial markets on the East Coast, which
dovetailed perfectly with school.
“The market closes and my job is done,”
said Davidson, who finishes at 2 PM before starting
class at 5 PM. “I don’t take my work
home with me.”
He scheduled clinical rotations on the weekends.
Furthermore, the financial industry salary paid
his full tuition. “The job paid for school,
without having to move home or take out loans
— without a humongous change in lifestyle,”
he said.
By contrast, Joy Toth chose to leave her profession
outside the medical industry during nursing school.
Instead, she financed school with scholarships
and grants.
The 35-year-old single mother left an unhappy
marriage and moved in with her parents, but she
quickly found herself caring for three sick relatives.
Her experience with a nurse who helped her grandfather
and the family through the last stages of lung
cancer inspired her to become an RN.
During the school year, the former office manager
volunteers at her church’s ministry for
children and her grandmother’s nursing home.
Last summer and fall, she worked as a certified
nursing assistant, which helped pay for school
and reinforced her desire to continue her studies
during a particularly trying time.
“I was able to play a role that inspired
me to get into the nursing program and share my
experience with these families,” Toth said.
“Doing that brought back all my passion
for nursing, just as I was giving up hope.”
Personal priorities
Toth has struggled to find the right balance
between school, work, and life. At first, the
former corporate employee threw herself into school,
enrolling in 21 summer school units to satisfy
prerequisites for nursing school at Evergreen
State College in Olympia, Wash. At the same time,
she was recovering from a car accident that had
left her badly injured.
“Every spare minute I had I would study,
but I felt like I didn’t even know my daughter,”
Toth said. She avoided close friendships at school
and let her mother take over much of the responsibility
of caring for her daughter. It wasn’t long
before she began to feel so worthless that she
didn’t deserve to create free time for herself.
“As a nurse, you have to be loving, compassionate,
and accepting,” Toth said. “But how
can you offer yourself if you don’t love
yourself first?”
It took a failing grade in anatomy to convince
her that she needed to whittle down her ambitious
plans in order to succeed. Toth now has her LPN
and is on her way to her RN license. She’s
planning to attend graduate school to teach at
the college.
All students, regardless of their work and family
schedules, must realize what is important to them
and fit it in, Bleah said. “To me right
now, the most important thing is to graduate,
so I just focus on graduating,” she said.
“Whatever the problem is, I tackle it and
move on.”
For Toth, realizing her goals meant she had to
stop comparing herself to other students or even
to previously held expectations. Different students
will become nurses by different paths, she said.
“My path may be longer, but there’s
a reason,” she said. “I had experienced
these obstacles and they made me a strong person.”
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