RALEIGH (August 13, 2021) – What makes someone want to be a nurse?

“It runs the gamut,” Dr. Ann Marie Milner, Director of Nursing at Wake Technical Community College, says in the accompanying video. “Some people have sick parents, and it spurred them. Many of our students were sick when they were little, and they remember a nurse and how good it felt.”

Still others – including a lawyer and a dentist who became nurses at Wake Tech – want a career change.

“They just want to help people,” Milner said. “That’s the basics of this – giving care to others.”

AS IF TO ILLUSTRATE MILNER’S point, Haley Whitener, then a nursing student at Beaufort County Community College, told Higher Ed Works in 2019 how she recently lost her grandfather.

“That was actually how I was introduced to nursing,” Whitener says. “When you see a nurse take the time out of her day to explain something to someone that you love and to kind of put their mind at ease – that’s what really made me decide I wanted to be a nurse.

“I wanted to play that role in someone’s life where I could put their mind at ease and just give them that education and show them that compassion that they need.”

After her experience with her grandfather, Whitener said her first lecture on cardiac care “just clicked. I remember walking out of there feeling like, ‘This is something that I want to do.’” 

She went on to work at a cardiovascular intensive-care unit at Vidant Medical Center and is preparing to return to school to become a nurse practitioner.

“Beaufort has definitely helped point me in the right direction and helped me figure out who I was and who I want to be and how to kind of get there,” Whitener says.