Student Spotlight: Nursing- Allyson Weaver

I want to be a nurse and I want to work with children, I always have, but more than that, I want to work in emergency medicine. Here’s why:

Becoming an EMT is not easy. In fact, I was pretty terrified for the entire first month of the summer long class I took between freshman and sophomore year of college. My instructor, a Harley riding, tattooed, foul-mouth kind of guy, sat us down the second day of class and told us stories—horror stories, really—of things he had witnessed throughout his career in emergency medicine. Some of these stories had us grimacing; some stories had us in tears- but it’s not the stories themselves I remember. What I remember is that, at the end of his lesson, he said, “if you don’t think you can walk onto a scene like that and take on the responsibility, the weight, of knowing you are this person’s last hope, then you don’t belong here”. These words have stuck with me for the last three years. I think about them every time I get a new patient, every time I stop to help someone, every time our ambulance gets called out for a new emergency, and rather than scaring me, like it used to—it gives me courage. Because when a mother shoves her baby into your arms and says ‘help me’, there is nothing more empowering than being able to say ‘I got this’, and in doing that, taking some of that panic away from her, and placing it on my shoulders. I want to work with kids because kids are so resilient. They can bounce back from some of the worst situations and be running around again like nothing happened.

I got to see a lot of this first hand while working at a nurse for a summer camp this past summer. The camp had over 500 kids who stayed there for 7 full, jam-packed weeks. We had multiple broken bones, more than a few trips to the hospital, and an allergic reaction that ended in an ambulance trip to the ER. As I’m sure you can tell, I was fairly busy with all these active kiddos running around causing mayhem. And that was so fun getting to see them experience camp. But what makes my job worth while is being there when they aren’t feeling well, when they’ve hurt themselves, and being able to help put them back together so they can get back out to running around again.

I know that when I get my first nursing job I’m going to be just as nervous as I was those first few weeks of EMT school, back when I decided I wanted to go into emergency medicine, but I’m so lucky to have people like my instructors, my family, my friends, and people like the Blue While Scholarship Foundation who believe in me and have helped me to get to this point in my education.

So thank you to all of the people who supported me, who taught me that this job might not be an easy one, but it’s an important one, and who helped me find the joy in putting people back together again.