2017 Nursing Career Scholarship Winner Announced
The 2017 Travel Nursing Career Scholarship Winner is...
The email surprised Allisa McAleese when it recently popped up in her inbox. She clicked on it and was delighted to learn that she had received the very first Nursing Career Scholarship from TravelNursing.com.
“I’d forgotten I’d applied,” she confessed. “I was like, ‘Yay!’”
When McAleese applied for the scholarship, she already had goals. “I wanted to get my BSN and then get some experience and then do some travel nursing,” she said.
The scholarship will definitely help McAleese, who graduated from nursing school in Portland, Oregon in September, pursue her dreams and reach those goals--and more. Remember her name, everyone: this nurse is going places!
Furthering her nursing education
McAleese actually started out as an EMT. She played with the idea of med school but ruled it out. Direct patient care appealed to her, so she knocked out the pre-requisites for nursing school and then got her RN.
She recently landed her first nursing job in Medford, Oregon at Providence Medford Medical Center. In February, she started a year-long nursing residency program that will further prepare her for a long, successful career in nursing.
But like many nurses and nurses-in-training, McAleese knew she’d need to find a way to pay for her education. In fact, that’s part of the reason that she decided to go ahead and start working as an nurse while pursuing her bachelor’s degree through an online program.
Each semester of her program with the University of Providence in Great Lakes, Ohio, costs about $1,400, so the Nursing Career Scholarship will help pay for a big chunk of her tuition costs.
Clearly, earning a BSN is very important to her. “I really believe in education and furthering my education so I can better treat and care for my patients,” she explained. “I also really want to be in a leadership position eventually, and you have to have a bachelor’s degree.”
But her list of goals doesn’t stop there. In the past, McAleese tutored some other students. She realized how much she liked being able to blend her skills and interests in such a way, which got her thinking about a possible career path. Knowing that nursing schools need faculty members to educate the nursing workforce of the future, McAleese set herself another goal.
“I’d like to get my master’s degree because I’d like to teach one day, too,” she said.
She might be a traditional faculty member, but she can certainly envision herself in a clinical teaching role, too.
In the meantime, McAleese is enjoying her residency program. She is working hard to learn as much as she can in her residency while juggling the demands of her online BSN program. She’s taking two classes right now in addition to working two 12-hour shifts and participating in a course on Thursdays for her residency. (She is currently working in med-surg, learning about all the different types of patients and situations a nurse might encounter there.) She’s also participating in a weekly four-hour shift in which she shadows a faculty member to learn more about their job.
She’s also investigating the possibility of participating in a loan repayment program through HRSA that would require her to work in a critically underserved area for a couple of years in exchange for loan forgiveness.
McAleese is definitely busy--as she joked, “Free time, what’s that?”--but it’s clear that she is right at home, doing what she’s doing right now.
WANT TO WIN $1,000 toward your nursing career? Enter our annual Travel Nursing Career Scholarship.