A Nontraditional Path to a Rewarding Career
Oct 16, 2009
It’s a long and winding road from painting the art for the cover of a hit record album to earning a Ph.D. so you can become a nursing professor, but for Sheila Linz, it’s a logical one that represents the culmination of a lifelong dream. One of 30 nurses who have received full scholarships and stipends through the New Jersey Nursing Initiative’s Faculty Preparation program, Linz is helping solve the state’s nurse faculty shortage at the same time she is entering a secure and rewarding field.
Linz first became interested in nursing while she was teaching art to psychiatric patients in New York City. A graduate of the University of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, she was working as an artist and photo stylist when a friend helped her get a weekend job teaching art and photography to psychiatric patients. “I felt that, on some level I wasn’t doing something important,” Linz said. “I loved what I did, but that work made me realize that something was missing. And once I began working with patients, and affecting people’s lives, I felt like I was doing something worthwhile.”
It was then that Sheila Linz decided to make the leap to a career in nursing. “I needed to choose a direction for my life and I wanted to do something I love,” she says. So, as her 40th birthday approached, Linz enrolled in an accelerated nursing program at Columbia University that was designed for students earning their second bachelor’s degrees.
She later earned her Masters of Science in Nursing, and began working as a psychiatric nurse practitioner at several shelters, including a 200-bed men’s homeless shelter in Washington Heights and a youth shelter in Harlem. As the primary provider of psychiatric services, Linz was responsible for a diagnosing, developing care plans and treating patients.
While she enjoyed her work, the two-and-a-half hour commute to New York from her home in rural New Jersey had begun to take a toll. Then, one night at 10 PM, just before leaving the shelter to go home, Linz came across an advertisement for a nursing instructor at Seton Hall University. “I had always wanted to be a teacher,” she says. “I thought it was too late, but I took a chance and sent in my Curriculum Vitae.”
It was six months before she heard anything back. But on the same day that she was offered a new position as a nurse practitioner, an offer came through from Seton Hall. Linz worked as a nursing instructor on the Seton Hall faculty for two years before learning of the New Jersey Nursing Initiative Faculty Preparation program. She applied immediately, and was thrilled to learn that she was accepted as a scholar.
“I am not in a position to work on a Ph.D. without working full-time,” Linz says. “This grant is letting me do that.”
Her research project will involve studying people who are homeless and mentally ill, with the goal of finding ways to provide better care to this population in New Jersey. “In addition to earning my Ph.D. and becoming a Ph.D.-qualified a nursing professor, I’m hoping to make contributions to patients’ lives through my research,” she says. The New Jersey Nursing Initiative Faculty Preparation program is giving her the chance to do just that.