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Deciding to work toward a nursing career involves many challenges. The coursework
is difficult; critical thinking is challenging and a struggle for many. But once students
begin to attend clinical courses where they start caring for real people with real
problems, students begin to see that the difficult path they have chosen is indeed
worth the struggle.
“When I have touched another life in a positive way, I feel so much joy in my heart
that I can’t help but smile,” says junior student Rachel Niles (pictured above). Niles
is a junior nursing student at the University of Wyoming. She has weathered not only
difficult pre-nursing and junior nursing coursework, but has also elected to add grueling
Army ROTC routines to her college experience (and will graduate as a Commissioned
Officer).
Niles chose to pursue nursing after a difficult time in her life personally:
“After watching and interacting with my mom's nurses when she was going through chemotherapy," Niles shares, "it finally clicked for me: I want to be the person who is always there when the going gets tough for someone else. When my mom passed away, the people who were there to hold my hand were her nurses, and I could never be more grateful for them.”
Niles continues, “As I go through the nursing program, I am starting to find myself in my studies and while working with the elderly in an assisted living community. I have never felt more alive than when I’m sitting with those I take care of.”
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02-03-2016