Bernadette Szymanski, Nursing

Why Porter

“I've been a CNA since I was 23 — long-term care, then the med-surg floor at the hospital in Lake City. I was good at it. But I kept watching RNs make the calls I could see coming, and I wanted to be the one making them. When my youngest started first grade, I ran out of excuses.”

Bernadette lives in the Cedar Bluff neighborhood, a ten-minute drive from campus, with her husband, a nine-year-old and a six-year-old. She is a junior in Nursing, and at 39 is the oldest student in her clinical cohort by eleven years. “I'm also the only one who has actually been yelled at by a charge nurse. I share that knowledge freely.”

The adult learner office helped her get credit for prior coursework from a certificate program years ago and connected her with the Working Parent Scholarship, which covers about a third of her tuition.

The hands-on part

Nursing students at Porter start clinical hours in their first year. For Bernadette the bigger surprise was the simulation hospital on the third floor of the Health Sciences Center, with its ER bay, ICU room and manikins that breathe, bleed and, on bad days, crash.

“I thought sim would be easy for me. It was the opposite. I'd done the tasks a thousand times, but I'd never had to say out loud why. In the debrief they make you explain your reasoning, and I'd go blank, because for fourteen years my reasoning was ‘the nurse told me to.’ That's what I'm really here to learn.”

• This semester: NURS 310, Medical-Surgical Nursing, with clinicals two days a week at Valley Health in Lake City — on the same floor where she used to work as a CNA.
• Skills practice: Thursday nights in the nursing skills lab, after bedtime, while her husband handles bath duty.

A hard semester

“Spring of my sophomore year, my daughter had pneumonia twice, I had a pharmacology exam every other week, and our car died. I came very close to withdrawing. I had the form filled out.

“Two things kept me in. My pharmacology professor let me take one exam in the testing center a day late without making me feel like a problem. And the Child & Family Center had an opening for after-school care for my son, with a childcare subsidy grant that brought it down to something we could pay. I stayed. I got a B in pharm. I framed it, kind of as a joke.”

She now runs a Sunday-night study group through the Adult & Nontraditional Students organization, held on Zoom so nobody has to find a babysitter.

A day in her week

Clinical days start early. Bernadette's alarm goes off at 4:45 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays so she can be on the unit in Lake City by 6:30; her husband handles the school drop-off.

• 6:30 a.m.: report from the night shift. “I used to be the one giving the CNA version of report. Now I'm writing down lab values and asking about the potassium.”
• 7 a.m.–2 p.m.: two patients, sometimes three, under her clinical instructor. Assessments, medication passes, care plans, a lot of charting.
• 2:30 p.m.: post-conference with her cohort, then the 40-minute drive home, usually with a pharmacology podcast.
• Evenings: homework, dinner, the kids' homework, then her own reading at the kitchen table after 8:30.

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are on campus: lectures in the Health Sciences Center and an afternoon in the skills lab. Lunch is in the commuter lounge, where she has, by her estimate, microwaved four hundred leftovers. “The younger students ask me about kids, mortgages and charge nurses. I ask them about the app for the bus. It's an even trade.”

What’s next

Bernadette expects to graduate in May 2028 and take the NCLEX that summer. She wants to stay at Valley Health on the med-surg floor and eventually teach clinical skills to new CNAs.

“If you're thinking you're too old, I'll tell you what my six-year-old told me: you're not too old, you're just tall. Also, read the scholarship list. There is money for people like us that nobody applies for.”