Faculty Voices
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After a happy childhood in an affluent suburb in New Jersey, Bob Atkins, Ph.D., M.S. N., B.S. N., B.A., embarked on a conventional journey through young adulthood: he started college at Brown University, double-majored in political science and American civilization, and set his sights on a career as a lawyer.
Male nurses are as rare in the Philippines are they are in the United States. But the lack of male role models in his native country didn’t deter Joel Regalado, B.S.N., M.N., A.C.N.P., from entering the profession. With encouragement from his older sister, a neo-natal intensive care nurse, Regalado enrolled in nursing school in the Philippines, where he discovered the joys not only of nursing but also of teaching.
The daughter and granddaughter of nurses, Susan Bakewell-Sachs, R.N., Ph.D., P.N.P.-B.C., never aspired to be a faculty member. But in the early 1980s she happened to hear nursing icon Claire Fagin, R.N., Ph.D., F.A.A.N., then dean of the school of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, discuss the importance of nurse education on the national news. Fagin’s message resonated with Bakewell-Sachs, then a young neonatal intensive care nurse at a medical health center in Virginia who had recently been passed over for a promotion. Soon after, Bakewell-Sachs packed up her bags and enrolled in the graduate nursing program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she embarked on an academic journey that would take her to the heights of nursing education.
Gloria J. McNeal, Ph.D., A.C.N.S.-B.C., A.P.N., F.A.A.N., goes the distance to treat patients and teach students. With over $2.5 million in extramural grant awards, McNeal designed and implemented an interdisciplinary, nurse-faculty managed mobile primary care clinic that has logged more than 38,000 miles and treated more than 2,000 underserved patients free-of-charge in Newark and other cities around the state. The clinic—the only one of its kind in the state—serves as a practice site for nursing and medical students and faculty.
Tracey Siegel, R.N., B.S.N., M.S.N., C.N.E., likes to tell her nursing students the story of her first attempt to catheterize a patient. When she was a student more than three decades ago, she contaminated four catheters before successfully inserting the tube on the fifth try. It's a story she tells to send a simple message: "If I could do it, you can do it."
Last spring, a student pulled Bonnie J Ross, R.N., B.S.N., M.A., aside and broke down in tears. The student had had a bad dream the night before about her brother, whom she had watched die from leukemia, and feared she would lose control in front of the patients she was caring for during one of her clinical experiences as a nursing student.